Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- David Cronenberg

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

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.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

10.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

11.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

12.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

13.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

14.

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

15.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

16.

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

Ciardi, John

17.

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

Schumann, Robert

18.

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

19.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

20.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

21.

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

Chopra, Deepak

22.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

23.

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

24.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

25.

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

26.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

27.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

28.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

29.

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

30.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

31.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

36.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

37.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

40.

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

Moses, Grandma

41.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

42.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

43.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

44.

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

45.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

46.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

47.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

48.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

49.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

50.

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

Ginsberg, Allen