Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Walt Whitman

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

Capp, Al

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

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

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

10.

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

11.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

12.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

13.

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

Weil, Simone

14.

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

Riding, Laura

15.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

16.

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

17.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

18.

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

19.

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

Edith Wharton

20.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

21.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

22.

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

Frye, Northrop

23.

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

24.

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

G. K. Chesterton

25.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

26.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

27.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

28.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

29.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

30.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

31.

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

Picasso, Pablo

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

37.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

38.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

39.

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

Jackson Pollock

40.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

41.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

42.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

43.

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

Wilson, Robert

44.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

45.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

46.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

47.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

48.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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.

50.

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