Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Kooning, Willem De

Best Quotes about Art

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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

Simonides

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

Kooning, Willem De

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

Camus, Albert

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

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

10.

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

11.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

12.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

14.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

15.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

16.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

17.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

18.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

19.

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

20.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

21.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

22.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

23.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

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

25.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

26.

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

27.

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

Bible

28.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

29.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

30.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

31.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

32.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

33.

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.

34.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

35.

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

36.

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

Sand, George

37.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

38.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

40.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

41.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

42.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

43.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

44.

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

Berle, Adolf

45.

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.

46.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

47.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

48.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

49.

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

50.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan