Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ruskin, John

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Edith Wharton

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

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

Kronenberger, Louis

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

Warhol, Andy

10.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

11.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

12.

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

Joyce, James

13.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

14.

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

15.

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

Isak Dineson

16.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

17.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

18.

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

19.

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

Einstein, Albert

20.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

21.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

22.

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

Paz, Octavio

23.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

27.

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

Mailer, Norman

28.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

29.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

30.

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

Piero Milani

31.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

32.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

34.

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

35.

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

Anderson, Judith

36.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

37.

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

David Cronenberg

38.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

39.

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

Truman, Harry S

40.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

41.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

42.

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

43.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Schumann, Robert

47.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

48.

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

49.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

50.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham