Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Anderson, Bill

Best Quotes about Art

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

Weil, Simone

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

Barenboim, Daniel

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

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Riding, Laura

12.

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

Al Capp

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

16.

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

17.

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

Simonides

18.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

19.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

20.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

21.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

22.

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

Anderson, Judith

23.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

25.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

26.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

27.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

29.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

30.

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

Schumann, Robert

31.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

32.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

33.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

34.

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

35.

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

Moses, Grandma

36.

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

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

Lowell, James Russell

38.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

39.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

40.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

44.

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

Burroughs, William S.

45.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

46.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

47.

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

48.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

49.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

50.

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