Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Stephen Nachmanovitch

Best Quotes about Art

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

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.

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

Ambrose Bierce

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

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

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

10.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

11.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

12.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

13.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

14.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

15.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

16.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

17.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

18.

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.

19.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

20.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

21.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

22.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

23.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

28.

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

Cioran, E. M.

29.

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

30.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

31.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

32.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

33.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

34.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

35.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

37.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

38.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

39.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

40.

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

41.

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

Gide, Andre

42.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

43.

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

44.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

45.

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

Simonides

46.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

47.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

48.

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

49.

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

Midler, Bette

50.

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