Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

- Ellis, Havelock

Best Quotes about Art

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

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

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Riding, Laura

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

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

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

10.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

11.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

12.

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

13.

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

Gutzkow

14.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

15.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

16.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

17.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

Truman, Harry S

19.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

20.

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

21.

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

Updike, John

22.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

23.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

25.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

29.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

30.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

31.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

32.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

33.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

34.

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

35.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

36.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

37.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

39.

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

40.

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

Piero Milani

41.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

44.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

45.

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

46.

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

47.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

48.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

49.

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

Yu Cao

50.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn