Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Capp, Al

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

10.

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.

11.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

12.

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

13.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

14.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

15.

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

Eliot, T. S.

16.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

17.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

19.

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

20.

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

Weil, Simone

21.

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

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.

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

24.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

29.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

30.

Love can heal a broken heart.

31.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

32.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

33.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

37.

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

Camus, Albert

38.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

39.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

40.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

41.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

46.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

47.

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

Frye, Northrop

48.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

49.

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

50.

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

Connolly, Cyril