Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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

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

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

Rosenberg, Harold

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

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

David Cronenberg

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

10.

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

11.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

13.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

15.

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

Jeff Melvoin

16.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

17.

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

Parker, Dorothy

18.

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

Mann, Horace

19.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

21.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

22.

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

23.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

24.

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

25.

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

Shakespeare, William

26.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Riding, Laura

30.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

31.

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

32.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

33.

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

Ambrose Bierce

34.

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

35.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

36.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

37.

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

Burroughs, William S.

38.

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

Isak Dineson

39.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

40.

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

Walt Whitman

41.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

42.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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.

44.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

45.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

46.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

47.

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

Yu Cao

48.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

49.

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

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo