Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Bellow, Saul

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

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

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

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

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

Motherwell, Robert

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

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

11.

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

Cather, Willa

12.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

13.

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

Updike, John

14.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

15.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

16.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

17.

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

Parker, Dorothy

18.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

19.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

20.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

21.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

22.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

23.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

24.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

25.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

26.

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

Kael, Pauline

27.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

28.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

29.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

30.

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

David Cronenberg

31.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

32.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

33.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

34.

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

35.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

36.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

37.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

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

39.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

40.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

41.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

42.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

43.

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

44.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

45.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

46.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

47.

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.

48.

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

Jackson Pollock

49.

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

Pablo Picasso

50.

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

Ciardi, John