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

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Duke Ellington

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Jackson Pollock

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

Andre Gide

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

10.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

11.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

12.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

13.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

15.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

16.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

20.

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

21.

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

Gill, Eric

22.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

23.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

William Baziotes

27.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

28.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

29.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

30.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

31.

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.

32.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

33.

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

34.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

35.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

38.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

39.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

40.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

41.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

42.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

46.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

48.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

49.

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

50.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John