Motivational Quotes

Art

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

- Moses, Grandma

Best Quotes about Art

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

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

Yu Cao

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

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

Ambrose Bierce

10.

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

Wilson, Robert

11.

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

12.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

13.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

14.

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

15.

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

Joyce, James

16.

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

Ruskin, John

17.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

18.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

19.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

20.

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

Ben Shahn

21.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

22.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

23.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

24.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

25.

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

26.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

27.

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

28.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

29.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

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.

31.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

32.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

33.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

35.

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

36.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

37.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

39.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

40.

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

41.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

42.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

43.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

44.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

46.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

47.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

48.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

49.

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

50.

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