Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Parker, Theodore

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

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

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

Kronenberger, Louis

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

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

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

10.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

11.

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

Klee, Paul

12.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

13.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

14.

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.

15.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

16.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

17.

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

18.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

20.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

21.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

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.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

24.

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

Ben Shahn

25.

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

26.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

27.

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

28.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

29.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

30.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

33.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

34.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

35.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

36.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

41.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

42.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

43.

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

Keller, Helen

44.

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

Kennedy, John F.

45.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

46.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

47.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

48.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

50.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence