Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ciardi, John

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

Love can heal a broken heart.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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

Einstein, Albert

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

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

10.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

11.

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

12.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

13.

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

14.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

15.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

16.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

17.

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

M. C. Richards

18.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

19.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

Joyce, James

21.

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

22.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

23.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

24.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

25.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

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

27.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

28.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

29.

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

Picasso, Pablo

30.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

31.

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

Kooning, Willem De

32.

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

Camus, Albert

33.

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

Burroughs, William S.

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.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

37.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

38.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

39.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

40.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

41.

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

Melville, Herman

42.

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

Anderson, Judith

43.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

44.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

45.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

46.

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

47.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

48.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

49.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

50.

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