Motivational Quotes

Art

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

- Crowley, Aleister

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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.

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.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

10.

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

Ciardi, John

11.

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

12.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

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.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

17.

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

18.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

19.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

22.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

27.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

28.

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

Bellow, Saul

29.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

30.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

31.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

32.

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

Thurber, James

33.

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

34.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

35.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

36.

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

Ruskin, John

37.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

38.

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

39.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

40.

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

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

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

43.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

46.

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

Camus, Albert

47.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

48.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

49.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

50.

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