Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ruckett

Best Quotes about Art

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

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

Driscoll, Louise

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Wilson, Robert

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

Klee, Paul

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

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

Berle, Adolf

10.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

11.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

12.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

13.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

14.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

15.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

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

18.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

19.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

20.

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

Riding, Laura

21.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Ovid

25.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

26.

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.

27.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

28.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

29.

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

Murdoch, Iris

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

34.

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

Ben Shahn

35.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

37.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

38.

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

39.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

43.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

44.

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

45.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

46.

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

Keller, Helen

47.

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

Simonides

48.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.