Motivational Quotes

Art

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Art

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

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

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

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

10.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

11.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

12.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

13.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

14.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

16.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

17.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

18.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

19.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

20.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

21.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

22.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

23.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

24.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

25.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

26.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

28.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

29.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

30.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

31.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

32.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

33.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

34.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

35.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

36.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

37.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

38.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

39.

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

40.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

41.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

42.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

43.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

44.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

45.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

46.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

47.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

48.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

49.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.