Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Connolly, Cyril

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

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.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

10.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

11.

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

Motherwell, Robert

12.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Walt Whitman

14.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

15.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

16.

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

17.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

18.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

20.

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

21.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

22.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

23.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

24.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

25.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

26.

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

27.

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

Cassady, Neal

28.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

29.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

30.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

31.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

32.

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

33.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

34.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

35.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

36.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

37.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

39.

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

Warhol, Andy

40.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

41.

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

Bellow, Saul

42.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

43.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

44.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

45.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

46.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

47.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

48.

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

Jackson Pollock

49.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

50.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul