Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Bellow, Saul

Best Quotes about Art

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

Barenboim, Daniel

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

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

Andre Gide

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.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

10.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

11.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

12.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

13.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

14.

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

Churchill, Winston

15.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

16.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

17.

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

18.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

20.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

21.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

22.

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

Kooning, Willem De

23.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

Bible

25.

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

26.

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

Keller, Helen

27.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

28.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

29.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

30.

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

31.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

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

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

35.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

36.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

37.

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

38.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

39.

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

40.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

41.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

42.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

43.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

44.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

45.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

46.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

47.

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

Bellow, Saul

48.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

49.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

50.

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