Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Eugene Delacroix

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

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

Jackson Pollock

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

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

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

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

10.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

11.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

12.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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

Al Capp

14.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

15.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

16.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

17.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

18.

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

Yu Cao

19.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

20.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

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

Ben Shahn

22.

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

Motherwell, Robert

23.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

24.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

25.

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

26.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

27.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

28.

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

Burroughs, William S.

29.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

31.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

32.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

33.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

34.

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

Keller, Helen

35.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

36.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

37.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

38.

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

39.

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

40.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

41.

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

42.

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

William Baziotes

43.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

44.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

46.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

47.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

48.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

49.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

50.

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

Klee, Paul