Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

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

M. C. Richards

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

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

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

11.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

12.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

13.

Faulkner, William

14.

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

15.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

16.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

17.

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

18.

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

Klee, Paul

19.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

20.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

21.

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

22.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

25.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

26.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

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

29.

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

Parker, Theodore

30.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

32.

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

Jacob, Max

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Ovid

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

41.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

42.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

43.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

44.

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

45.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

46.

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

47.

Love can heal a broken heart.

48.

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

Riding, Laura

49.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

50.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella