Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- M. C. Richards

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

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

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

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.

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

Burroughs, William S.

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

Berle, Adolf

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

Simonides

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

10.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

11.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

12.

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

Varese, Edward

13.

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

14.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

15.

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

Duke Ellington

16.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

17.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

18.

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

19.

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

20.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

21.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

22.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

23.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

27.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

28.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

29.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

30.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

31.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

32.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

33.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

34.

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

35.

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

Pablo Picasso

36.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

37.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

38.

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

39.

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

David Cronenberg

40.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Weil, Simone

42.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

43.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

44.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

45.

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

Ben Shahn

46.

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

Cather, Willa

47.

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.

48.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

49.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb