Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

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

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

10.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

11.

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

Kempis, Thomas

12.

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

13.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

14.

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

15.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

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

Yu Cao

17.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

18.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

19.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

20.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

21.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

22.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

23.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

24.

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

Parker, Dorothy

25.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

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

27.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

28.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

29.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

30.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

31.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Capp, Al

33.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

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

35.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

36.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

37.

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

38.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

40.

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

Conrad, Joseph

41.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

42.

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

Motherwell, Robert

43.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

44.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

45.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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.

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

Ambrose Bierce

48.

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

Burroughs, William S.

49.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

50.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.