Motivational Quotes

Art

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

- Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

Best Quotes about 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

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

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

Pablo Picasso

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

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

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

Jackson Pollock

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.

10.

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

11.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

16.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

17.

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

18.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

19.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

20.

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

Brown, John Mason

21.

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

22.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

23.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

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

25.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

26.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

27.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

29.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

30.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

32.

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

Parker, Theodore

33.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

34.

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

Churchill, Winston

35.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Duke Ellington

40.

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

41.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

42.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

44.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

45.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

46.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

47.

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

Camus, Albert

48.

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

Ruskin, John

49.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

50.

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