Motivational Quotes

Art

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Art

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

10.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

11.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

13.

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

14.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

15.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

16.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

17.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

18.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

19.

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

20.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

21.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

22.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

23.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

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

25.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

26.

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

27.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

29.

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

30.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

31.

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

Riding, Laura

32.

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

Mann, Horace

33.

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

Churchill, Winston

34.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

35.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

36.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

37.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

38.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

39.

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

40.

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

Schumann, Robert

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

43.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

44.

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

David Cronenberg

45.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

46.

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