Motivational Quotes

Art

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about 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

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

Mann, Horace

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

10.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

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

13.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

14.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

15.

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

David Cronenberg

16.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

17.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

18.

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

M. C. Richards

19.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

20.

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

Morris, William

21.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

22.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

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

Churchill, Winston

24.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

25.

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

Kael, Pauline

26.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

27.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

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.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

32.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

33.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

34.

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

35.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

36.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

37.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

38.

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

Jackson Pollock

39.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

40.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

41.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

42.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

43.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

44.

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

45.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

46.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

47.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

48.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

49.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

50.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack