Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

- Cassady, Neal

Best Quotes about Art

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

Frye, Northrop

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

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

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

10.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

11.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

12.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

13.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

14.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

15.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

20.

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

21.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

22.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

23.

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

24.

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

Ciardi, John

25.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

26.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

27.

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

Holyfield, Evander

28.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

29.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

30.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

32.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

33.

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

34.

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

Midler, Bette

35.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

36.

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

37.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

40.

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

41.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

42.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

43.

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

44.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

45.

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

46.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

47.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

48.

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

Andre Gide

49.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

50.

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