Motivational Quotes

Art

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

- French, Marilyn

Best Quotes about Art

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

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

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

Wordsworth, William

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

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.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

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

Weil, Simone

10.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

11.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

13.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

14.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

15.

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

Jacob, Max

16.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

17.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

18.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

20.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

21.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

22.

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

23.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

24.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

25.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

26.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

27.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

28.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

29.

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

30.

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

31.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

36.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

37.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

38.

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

39.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

40.

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

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.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

43.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

44.

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

45.

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

Piet Mondrian

46.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

47.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

48.

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