Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Art

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

10.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

11.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

13.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

14.

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

Capp, Al

15.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

16.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

17.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

18.

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

19.

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

Yu Cao

20.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

21.

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

Brown, John Mason

22.

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

23.

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

24.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

25.

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

Jackson Pollock

26.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

27.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

28.

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

29.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

30.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

31.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

34.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

Parker, Theodore

36.

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

Motherwell, Robert

37.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

38.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

39.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

40.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

41.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

43.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

44.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

45.

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

46.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

47.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

48.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

49.

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

Proust, Marcel

50.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William