Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Art

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

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

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

Jackson Pollock

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.

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

M. C. Richards

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

10.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

11.

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

12.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

13.

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

Motherwell, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

Walt Whitman

16.

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

17.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

18.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

19.

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

20.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

22.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

23.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

24.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

25.

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

Berle, Adolf

26.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

27.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

29.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

30.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

31.

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

32.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

33.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

35.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

36.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

37.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

38.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

39.

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

Midler, Bette

40.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

41.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

42.

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

Parker, Dorothy

43.

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

44.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

45.

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

46.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

47.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

48.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

49.

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

Thurber, James

50.

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