Motivational Quotes

Art

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

- Eugene Delacroix

Best Quotes about Art

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

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

Dubuffet, Jean

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

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

Parker, Theodore

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

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

Frost, Robert

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

Eliot, T. S.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

10.

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

Ciardi, John

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

Truman, Harry S

14.

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

Paz, Octavio

15.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

16.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

17.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

18.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Camus, Albert

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Burroughs, William S.

25.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

26.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

27.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

28.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

29.

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

30.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

31.

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

32.

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

Riding, Laura

33.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

34.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

35.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

36.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

37.

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

Kooning, Willem De

38.

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

Simonides

39.

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

40.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

41.

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

42.

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

43.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

44.

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.

45.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

46.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

47.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

48.

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

49.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

50.

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

Ben Shahn