Motivational Quotes

Art

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

- Geldzahler, Henry

Best Quotes about Art

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

10.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

11.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

12.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

13.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

14.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

15.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

16.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

17.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

18.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

19.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

20.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

21.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

22.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

23.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

24.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

25.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

26.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

28.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

29.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

30.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

31.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

32.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

33.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

34.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

35.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

36.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

37.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

38.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

39.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

40.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

41.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

42.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

43.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

44.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

45.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

46.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

48.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

49.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

50.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John