Motivational Quotes

Art

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

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

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

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

10.

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

Piet Mondrian

11.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

12.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

13.

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

West, Rebecca

14.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

15.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

16.

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

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

19.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Duke Ellington

23.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

24.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

25.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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.

27.

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

Warhol, Andy

28.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

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

Truman, Harry S

30.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

31.

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

32.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

33.

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

34.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

35.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

36.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

37.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

38.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Chopra, Deepak

40.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

41.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

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.

45.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

46.

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

47.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

48.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

49.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

50.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.