Motivational Quotes

Art

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

- Ciardi, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

Henry Ward Beecher

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

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

Riding, Laura

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

Novalis

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

Ruckett

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

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.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

10.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

11.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

14.

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

Frye, Northrop

15.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

16.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

18.

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

Wilson, Robert

19.

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

20.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

21.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

22.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

23.

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

24.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

25.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

26.

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

Weil, Simone

27.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

28.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

30.

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

Proust, Marcel

31.

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

Varese, Edward

32.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

33.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

34.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

35.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

37.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

39.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

40.

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

Blackie, Professor

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

46.

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

M. C. Richards

47.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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