Motivational Quotes

Art

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

- Cather, Willa

Best Quotes about Art

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

Mann, Horace

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

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

Pablo Picasso

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

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

Parker, Dorothy

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Ciardi, John

13.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

14.

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

Piet Mondrian

15.

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

Burroughs, William S.

16.

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

17.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

18.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

19.

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

Morris, William

20.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

25.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

26.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

27.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

28.

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

Varese, Edward

29.

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.

30.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

31.

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

32.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

34.

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

35.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

36.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

37.

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

38.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

40.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

41.

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

42.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

43.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

44.

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

Midler, Bette

45.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

46.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

49.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

50.

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