Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

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

Ruskin, John

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

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

Jackson Pollock

10.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

11.

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

12.

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

Ben Shahn

13.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

14.

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

Cather, Willa

15.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

16.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

17.

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.

18.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

19.

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

20.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

22.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

24.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

29.

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

30.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

32.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

33.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

34.

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

35.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

36.

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

37.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

39.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

40.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

41.

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.

42.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

43.

Bunuel, Luis

44.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

45.

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

Anderson, Bill

46.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

47.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

48.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

49.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

50.

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