Motivational Quotes

Art

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

- Ciardi, John

Best Quotes about Art

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

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

Burroughs, William S.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

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

Berle, Adolf

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

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

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

Kooning, Willem De

10.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

14.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

15.

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

16.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

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

19.

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

20.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

21.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

22.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

23.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

24.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

25.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

26.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

27.

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

Warhol, Andy

28.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

29.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

30.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

31.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

35.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

36.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

37.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

38.

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

Isak Dineson

39.

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

40.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

41.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

42.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

43.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

44.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

45.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

46.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

47.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

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

M. C. Richards

50.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall