Motivational Quotes

Art

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about 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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

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

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

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

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

David Cronenberg

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

Parker, Dorothy

10.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Simonides

14.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

15.

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

Piet Mondrian

16.

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

17.

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

Parker, Theodore

18.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

19.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

20.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

21.

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

Eliot, T. S.

22.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

23.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

24.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

25.

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

26.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

27.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

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

Schumann, Robert

29.

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

30.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

31.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Burroughs, William S.

33.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

34.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

35.

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

Kennedy, John F.

36.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

37.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

38.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

39.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

40.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

43.

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

44.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.