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

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

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

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

Moses, Grandma

11.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

12.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

16.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

17.

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

18.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

Peri, Gabriel

21.

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

Parker, Theodore

22.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

23.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

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

25.

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

26.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

27.

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

M. C. Richards

28.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

29.

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

30.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

31.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

32.

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

33.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

34.

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

Eliot, T. S.

35.

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

Melville, Herman

36.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

37.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

38.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

39.

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

Kooning, Willem De

40.

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

41.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

42.

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

Walt Whitman

43.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

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.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

46.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

47.

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

Riding, Laura

48.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.