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

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

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

Eugene Delacroix

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

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

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

10.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

11.

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

12.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

13.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

14.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

15.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

16.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

20.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

21.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

22.

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

23.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

24.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

29.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

30.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

31.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

32.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

Varese, Edward

34.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

35.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

36.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

37.

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

Paz, Octavio

38.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

39.

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

40.

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

West, Rebecca

41.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

42.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

43.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

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

Walt Whitman

47.

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

Ambrose Bierce

48.

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

49.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

50.

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