Motivational Quotes

Art

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

- Capp, Al

Best Quotes about Art

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

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

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

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

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

Duke Ellington

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

Love can heal a broken heart.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

10.

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

11.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

12.

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

13.

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

Riding, Laura

14.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

15.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

16.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

17.

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

Moses, Grandma

18.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

19.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

23.

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

Isak Dineson

24.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

27.

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)

28.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

29.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

30.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

31.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

35.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

36.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

37.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

41.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

44.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

45.

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

46.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

47.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

48.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

49.

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