Motivational Quotes

Art

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

- Chopra, Deepak

Best Quotes about Art

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

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

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

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

Joyce, James

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

10.

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

M. C. Richards

11.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

12.

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

Frye, Northrop

13.

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

West, Rebecca

14.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

18.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

19.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

20.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

21.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

24.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

25.

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

Conrad, Joseph

26.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

27.

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

28.

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

29.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

30.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

31.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

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

Ambrose Bierce

33.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

34.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

35.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

36.

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

Pablo Picasso

37.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Updike, John

41.

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

Parker, Dorothy

42.

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

Berle, Adolf

43.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

45.

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

46.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

47.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

48.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

49.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

50.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair