Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

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

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

Camus, Albert

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

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

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

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

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

10.

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

11.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

12.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

13.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

14.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

15.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Walt Whitman

17.

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

Simonides

18.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

19.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

20.

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

Motherwell, Robert

21.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

22.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

23.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

24.

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

Ambrose Bierce

25.

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

Andre Gide

26.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

27.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

29.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

30.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

31.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

32.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

33.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

34.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

35.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

36.

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

37.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

38.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

39.

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

40.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

41.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

42.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

45.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

46.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

47.

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

Picasso, Pablo

48.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John