Motivational Quotes

Art

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

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

Piero Milani

10.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

11.

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

12.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

15.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

16.

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

17.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

18.

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

Weil, Simone

19.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

20.

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

Isak Dineson

21.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

22.

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

23.

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

Parker, Theodore

24.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

25.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

26.

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

27.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

30.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

31.

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

Ovid

32.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

33.

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

34.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

35.

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

Eliot, T. S.

36.

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

Updike, John

37.

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

38.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

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.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

41.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

42.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

43.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

44.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

45.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

46.

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

Driscoll, Louise

47.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

48.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

49.

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

Wordsworth, William

50.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward