Motivational Quotes

Art

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

- Federico Fellini

Best Quotes about Art

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

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

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

10.

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

Andre Gide

11.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

12.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

13.

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

Varese, Edward

14.

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

Burroughs, William S.

15.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

16.

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

Woodberry, George E.

17.

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

18.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

19.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

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

Gutzkow

22.

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

Murdoch, Iris

23.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

24.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

26.

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

Einstein, Albert

27.

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

28.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

29.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

30.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

31.

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

32.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

33.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

34.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

35.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

36.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

37.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

38.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

39.

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

Joyce, James

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

43.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

44.

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

45.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

46.

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

47.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

48.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

49.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

50.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian