Motivational Quotes

Art

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

- Bayley, Stephen

Best Quotes about Art

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

Updike, John

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

10.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

11.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

12.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

13.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

16.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

17.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

18.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

19.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

23.

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

24.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

25.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

26.

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

27.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

28.

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.

29.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

31.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

32.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

33.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

34.

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

Kooning, Willem De

35.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

36.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

37.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

38.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

39.

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.

40.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

41.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

42.

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

Midler, Bette

43.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

45.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

46.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

50.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William