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

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

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

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

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

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

10.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

11.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

12.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

14.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

15.

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

Parker, Dorothy

16.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

17.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

18.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

19.

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

Thurber, James

20.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

24.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

27.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

28.

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

29.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

30.

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

31.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

32.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

33.

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

G. K. Chesterton

34.

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

Weil, Simone

35.

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.

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 merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

38.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

39.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

40.

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

41.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

42.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

43.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

44.

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

Andre Gide

45.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

46.

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

47.

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