Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

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

10.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

11.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

12.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

13.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

14.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

15.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

16.

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

Mailer, Norman

17.

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

18.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

20.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

21.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

22.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

23.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

24.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

25.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

26.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

27.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

28.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

29.

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

30.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

31.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

32.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

33.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

34.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

35.

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

Piet Mondrian

36.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

37.

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.

38.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

39.

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

40.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

41.

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

Isak Dineson

42.

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

Jacob, Max

43.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

44.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

45.

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.

46.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

47.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

48.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

49.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

50.

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