Motivational Quotes

Art

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

- Cioran, E. M.

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

10.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

11.

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

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.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

17.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

18.

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

Connolly, Cyril

19.

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

Eliot, T. S.

20.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

21.

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

Kooning, Willem De

22.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

23.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

24.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

25.

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

26.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

27.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

28.

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

29.

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

30.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

31.

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

32.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

34.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

35.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

36.

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

Motherwell, Robert

37.

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

Picasso, Pablo

38.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

39.

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

40.

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

Weil, Simone

41.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

42.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

43.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

44.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

45.

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

Pablo Picasso

46.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

47.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

48.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

49.

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.

50.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell