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

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

Cather, Willa

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

Updike, John

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

Frost, Robert

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

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

10.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

11.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

12.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

13.

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

14.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

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

16.

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

Kael, Pauline

17.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

18.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

19.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

20.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

21.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

23.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

24.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

26.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

27.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

28.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

29.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

30.

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

31.

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

Varese, Edward

32.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

33.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

34.

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

35.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

36.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

37.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

38.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

39.

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

40.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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

Murdoch, Iris

42.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

44.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

45.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

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

Simonides

47.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

48.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

49.

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