Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

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

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

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

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

Ciardi, John

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

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

10.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

11.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

12.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

13.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

14.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

15.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

17.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

18.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

19.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

20.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

27.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Jackson Pollock

29.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Ambrose Bierce

32.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

34.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

35.

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

36.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

37.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

38.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

39.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

40.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

41.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

43.

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

44.

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

45.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

46.

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

47.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

48.

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

49.

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

Motherwell, Robert

50.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord