Motivational Quotes

Art

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

- Forster, Edward M.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Jackson Pollock

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Kronenberger, Louis

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

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

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

Howe, Nathaniel

10.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

11.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

12.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

13.

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

Cassady, Neal

14.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

15.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

16.

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

Andre Gide

17.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

18.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

19.

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.

20.

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

Piet Mondrian

21.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

22.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

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

24.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

25.

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

Yu Cao

26.

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

27.

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

28.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

30.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

31.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

32.

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

Jeff Melvoin

33.

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

Holyfield, Evander

34.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

35.

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

36.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

37.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

38.

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

39.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Thurber, James

46.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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