Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

11.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

12.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

13.

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

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

16.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

17.

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

18.

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

Gill, Eric

19.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

20.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

21.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

22.

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

Klee, Paul

23.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

24.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

25.

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

Eugene Delacroix

26.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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

Jeff Melvoin

28.

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

29.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

30.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

31.

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

32.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

33.

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

34.

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

Gide, Andre

35.

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

Pascal, Blaise

36.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

37.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

38.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

39.

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

40.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

41.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

42.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

43.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

44.

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

45.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

46.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

47.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

48.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

49.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

50.

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.