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

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

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

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

Thurber, James

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

10.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

11.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

14.

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

15.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

16.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

17.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

18.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

19.

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

20.

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

Eugene Delacroix

21.

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

Motherwell, Robert

22.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

23.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

24.

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

25.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

26.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

27.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

28.

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

29.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

30.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

31.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

32.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

33.

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

34.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

36.

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

37.

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

William Baziotes

38.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

39.

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

40.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

41.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

42.

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

Gide, Andre

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

46.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

47.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

48.

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.

49.

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

Klee, Paul

50.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso