Motivational Quotes

Art

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

- Winkelmann

Best Quotes about Art

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

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

Yu Cao

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

Driscoll, Louise

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

10.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

11.

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

Truman, Harry S

12.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

13.

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

14.

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

George Tooker

15.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

19.

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

20.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

21.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

22.

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

23.

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

Weil, Simone

24.

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

25.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

26.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

27.

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

28.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Picasso, Pablo

32.

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

33.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

34.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

35.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

36.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

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

William Baziotes

38.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

39.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

40.

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

41.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

42.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Eliot, T. S.

46.

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

Ben Shahn

47.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

48.

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.

49.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

50.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George