Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Joseph Chilton Pearce

Best Quotes about Art

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

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

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

10.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

11.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

12.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

13.

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

14.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

15.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

17.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

18.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

21.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

22.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

23.

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

Conrad, Joseph

24.

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

25.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

26.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

27.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

28.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

32.

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

Midler, Bette

33.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

34.

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

35.

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

Yu Cao

36.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

38.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

39.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

40.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

41.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

42.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

43.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

44.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

45.

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

Capp, Al

46.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

47.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

48.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

49.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

50.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline