Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

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

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

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

Piero Milani

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

10.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

11.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

12.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

13.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

14.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

15.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

17.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

19.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

20.

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

Conrad, Joseph

21.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

22.

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

23.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

24.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

25.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

26.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

27.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Parker, Dorothy

29.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

30.

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

Cather, Willa

31.

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.

32.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

35.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

36.

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

Truman, Harry S

37.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

38.

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

39.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

40.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

41.

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

42.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

44.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

45.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

46.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

47.

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

48.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

49.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

50.

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