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

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

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

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

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

10.

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

Riding, Laura

11.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

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)

14.

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

Cassady, Neal

15.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

16.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

17.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

18.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

22.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

23.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

24.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

25.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

26.

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

27.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

31.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

32.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

33.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

35.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

36.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

37.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

38.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

39.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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.

42.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

43.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

44.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

45.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

46.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

47.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo