Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Berle, Adolf

Best Quotes about Art

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

William Baziotes

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Waugh, Evelyn

10.

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

11.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

12.

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

Ruskin, John

13.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

14.

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

15.

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

Motherwell, Robert

16.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

17.

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

18.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

19.

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

Ben Shahn

20.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

21.

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

22.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

Jacob, Max

24.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

25.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

26.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

27.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

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

Connolly, Cyril

29.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

30.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

31.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

32.

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

33.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

34.

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

Camus, Albert

35.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

36.

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

Weil, Simone

37.

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

38.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

39.

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

Wordsworth, William

40.

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

41.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

42.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

43.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

44.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

45.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

46.

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

47.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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

50.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis