Motivational Quotes

Art

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

- Bovee, Christian Nevell

Best Quotes about Art

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

Connolly, Cyril

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

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

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

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

10.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

11.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

12.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

14.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

15.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

16.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

17.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

18.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

19.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

20.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

21.

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

22.

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

23.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

Motherwell, Robert

25.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

27.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

29.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

32.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

33.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

35.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

36.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

37.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

39.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

40.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

41.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

42.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

43.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

44.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

45.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

46.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

47.

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

Jackson Pollock

48.

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

Duke Ellington

49.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

50.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra