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

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

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

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

Novalis

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

Kennedy, John F.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Duke Ellington

10.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

11.

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

12.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

13.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

14.

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

Kooning, Willem De

15.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

16.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

17.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

18.

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

19.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

23.

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

Gide, Andre

24.

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

David Cronenberg

25.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

26.

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

27.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Picasso, Pablo

29.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

31.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

32.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

33.

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

Thurber, James

34.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

35.

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

36.

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

37.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

38.

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

39.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

40.

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

Holyfield, Evander

41.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

42.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

43.

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

44.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

45.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

46.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

48.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

49.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

50.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin