Motivational Quotes

Art

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

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

Rosenberg, Harold

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

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.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

10.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

11.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

12.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

13.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

14.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

15.

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

Parker, Theodore

16.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

17.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

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

20.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

21.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

22.

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

Ruckett

23.

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

24.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

25.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

26.

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

Truman, Harry S

27.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

28.

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

Frye, Northrop

29.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

30.

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

31.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

32.

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

Murdoch, Iris

33.

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

Picasso, Pablo

34.

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

35.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

38.

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

39.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

41.

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

42.

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

Simonides

43.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

44.

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

45.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

47.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

48.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

49.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

50.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean