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

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

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

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

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

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

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

Anderson, Lindsay

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

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

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

Gutzkow

10.

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

Ward Jenkins

11.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

12.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

13.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

14.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

15.

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

Duke Ellington

16.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

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

Motherwell, Robert

18.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

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

Moses, Grandma

20.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

21.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

22.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

23.

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

Ruskin, John

24.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

25.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

26.

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

Gide, Andre

27.

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

Warhol, Andy

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

31.

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

Mann, Horace

32.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

33.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

34.

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

35.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

36.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

37.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

38.

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

Blackie, Professor

39.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

40.

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

Piet Mondrian

41.

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

Murdoch, Iris

42.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

43.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

44.

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

45.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

46.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

47.

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

48.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

49.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

50.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander