Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

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

David Cronenberg

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

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

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

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Parker, Dorothy

11.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

12.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

13.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

14.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

15.

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

Frye, Northrop

16.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

17.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

18.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

19.

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

20.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

21.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

22.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

23.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

26.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

27.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

28.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

29.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

32.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

33.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

34.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

35.

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

36.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

37.

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

38.

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

Ambrose Bierce

39.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

41.

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

Schumann, Robert

42.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

43.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

44.

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

45.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

46.

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

47.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

48.

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

Piet Mondrian

49.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

50.

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