Motivational Quotes

Art

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

- Cather, Willa

Best Quotes about Art

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

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

Conrad, Joseph

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Chopra, Deepak

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

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

10.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

11.

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

12.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

13.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

20.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

21.

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

Einstein, Albert

22.

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

23.

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

Frye, Northrop

24.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

25.

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.

26.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

27.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

28.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

29.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

30.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

34.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

35.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

36.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

37.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

38.

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

39.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

40.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

41.

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

Andre Gide

42.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

43.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

45.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

46.

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

Frost, Robert

47.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

48.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

49.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

50.

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