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

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

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

David Cronenberg

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

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

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

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

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

Weil, Simone

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

11.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

12.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

14.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

15.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

16.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

17.

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

Warhol, Andy

18.

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

Moses, Grandma

19.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

20.

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

Proverb, Chinese

21.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

22.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

23.

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

Ovid

24.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

25.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

26.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

27.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

28.

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

29.

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

Conrad, Joseph

30.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

31.

Love can heal a broken heart.

32.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

33.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

34.

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

Schumann, Robert

35.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

36.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

37.

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.

38.

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

Piero Milani

39.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

40.

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

Paz, Octavio

41.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

42.

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

Pablo Picasso

43.

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

44.

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

Driscoll, Louise

45.

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

46.

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

Kennedy, John F.

47.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

48.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

49.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

50.

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

Churchill, Winston