Motivational Quotes

Art

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

- Bellow, Saul

Best Quotes about Art

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

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

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

Pablo Picasso

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

14.

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

15.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

16.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

18.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

19.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

20.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

24.

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

Camus, Albert

25.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

26.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

27.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

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

30.

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

Burroughs, William S.

31.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

32.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

33.

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

Jacob, Max

34.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

35.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

36.

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

37.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

38.

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

39.

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

40.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

41.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

42.

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.

43.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

44.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

45.

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

Simonides

46.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

47.

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

Duke Ellington

48.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

49.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

50.

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