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

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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 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

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

Ciardi, John

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

Eugene Delacroix

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

David Cronenberg

13.

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

Frost, Robert

14.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

15.

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)

16.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

17.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

18.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

19.

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

Simonides

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.

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

22.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

23.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

24.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

25.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

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

Schumann, Robert

27.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

28.

Love can heal a broken heart.

29.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

33.

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

34.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

35.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

36.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

37.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

38.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

39.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

40.

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.

41.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

42.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

43.

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

44.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

45.

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

46.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

47.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

48.

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

Burroughs, William S.

49.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.