Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

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

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

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

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

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

Ward Jenkins

10.

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

Parker, Dorothy

11.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

12.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

13.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

14.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

15.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

16.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

17.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

18.

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

19.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

20.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

21.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

22.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

23.

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

24.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

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.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

27.

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

28.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

29.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

31.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

33.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

34.

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

Frye, Northrop

35.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

36.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

M. C. Richards

41.

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

42.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

43.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

44.

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

Proust, Marcel

45.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

46.

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

David Cronenberg

47.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

48.

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

49.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

50.

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

Yu Cao