Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Bowen, Elizabeth

Best Quotes about Art

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

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

Mann, Horace

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

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

Murdoch, Iris

10.

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

11.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

13.

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

14.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

16.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

21.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

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

24.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

Kennedy, John F.

26.

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

27.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

28.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

29.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

30.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

32.

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.

33.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

34.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

35.

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

36.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

37.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

38.

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

39.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

40.

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

41.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

42.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

43.

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

44.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

45.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

46.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

47.

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

Moses, Grandma

48.

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

49.

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

Picasso, Pablo

50.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso