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

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Camus, Albert

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

10.

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

11.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

12.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

13.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

14.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

15.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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

17.

Bunuel, Luis

18.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

19.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

21.

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

22.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

23.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

24.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

25.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

26.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

27.

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

28.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

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

30.

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

Mann, Horace

31.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

32.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

33.

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

Warhol, Andy

34.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

35.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

36.

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

Kennedy, John F.

37.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

38.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

39.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

40.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

41.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

42.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

43.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

44.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

45.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

46.

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

47.

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

Gutzkow

48.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

49.

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.

50.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney