Motivational Quotes

Art

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

- Dali, Salvador

Best Quotes about Art

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

10.

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

Murdoch, Iris

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

14.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

18.

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

Camus, Albert

19.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

20.

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

21.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

22.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

23.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

24.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

25.

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

26.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

27.

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

Parker, Dorothy

28.

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

29.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

30.

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

31.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

32.

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

Eugene Delacroix

33.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

34.

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

Piet Mondrian

35.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

36.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

37.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

38.

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

Berle, Adolf

39.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

40.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

42.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

43.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

44.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

45.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

46.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

47.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

48.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

49.

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

50.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von