Motivational Quotes

Art

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

- Fischer, Ernst

Best Quotes about Art

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Weil, Simone

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

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

Dubuffet, Jean

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

10.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

11.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

12.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

13.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

14.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

15.

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

16.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

17.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

18.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

19.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

20.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

22.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

23.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

24.

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

25.

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

Shakespeare, William

26.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

31.

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

Andre Gide

32.

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

Cassady, Neal

33.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

34.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

35.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

36.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

39.

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

Eugene Delacroix

40.

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

Parker, Dorothy

41.

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

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

43.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

44.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

45.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

46.

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

Wilson, Robert

47.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

48.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

49.

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

Piet Mondrian

50.

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

Joyce, James