Motivational Quotes

Art

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Art

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

Anderson, Bill

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

Kooning, Willem De

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

Ben Shahn

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

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

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

10.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

11.

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.

12.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

13.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

14.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

15.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

17.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

18.

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

19.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

22.

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

Paz, Octavio

23.

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

24.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

25.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

26.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

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

Lowell, James Russell

28.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

30.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

31.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

32.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

33.

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

Burroughs, William S.

34.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

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

36.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

38.

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

Eliot, T. S.

39.

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

40.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

41.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

42.

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

Simonides

43.

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

Andre Gide

44.

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

45.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

46.

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

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.

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

49.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

50.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille