Motivational Quotes

Art

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

- Kempis, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

10.

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

11.

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

Frye, Northrop

12.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

Paz, Octavio

14.

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

15.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

16.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

17.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

18.

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

19.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

20.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

26.

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

Parker, Dorothy

27.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

28.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

29.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

35.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

36.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Jacob, Max

40.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

Gide, Andre

43.

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

44.

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

Jackson Pollock

45.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

47.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

49.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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