Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Gide, Andre

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

10.

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

Burroughs, William S.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

14.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

15.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

17.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

18.

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

Driscoll, Louise

19.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

20.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

21.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

22.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

23.

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

Pablo Picasso

24.

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

25.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

26.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

27.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

29.

Love can heal a broken heart.

30.

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

31.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

32.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

33.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

34.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

35.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

36.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

37.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

38.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

41.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

42.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

43.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

44.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

45.

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

Simonides

46.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

47.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Brancusi, Constantin