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

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

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

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

Weil, Simone

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

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

10.

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

Ambrose Bierce

11.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

12.

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

13.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

14.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

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.

16.

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

Picasso, Pablo

17.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

18.

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

Kooning, Willem De

19.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

20.

Love can heal a broken heart.

21.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

22.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

23.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

24.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

25.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

26.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

27.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

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.

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

Picasso, Pablo

30.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

31.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

33.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

37.

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

38.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

39.

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

Brown, John Mason

40.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

41.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

42.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

46.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

47.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

48.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

49.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse