Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

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

Parker, Theodore

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

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

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

Driscoll, Louise

10.

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

Frye, Northrop

11.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

13.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

14.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

15.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

16.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

17.

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

18.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

19.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

21.

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

Ovid

22.

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.

23.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

24.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

25.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

26.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

27.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

28.

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

Melville, Herman

29.

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

30.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

31.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

32.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

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.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

35.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

36.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

37.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

39.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

40.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

41.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

42.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

43.

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

Eliot, T. S.

44.

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

45.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

47.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

48.

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.

49.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

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