Motivational Quotes

Art

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

- Frost, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ciardi, John

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

Isak Dineson

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

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

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

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

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.

10.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

11.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

12.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

13.

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

Kooning, Willem De

14.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

15.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

16.

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

G. K. Chesterton

17.

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

Kennedy, John F.

18.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

19.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

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.

22.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

23.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

George Tooker

25.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

27.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

28.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

29.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

30.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

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.

33.

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

Piet Mondrian

34.

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

35.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

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

Proverb, Chinese

40.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

41.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

42.

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

Novalis

43.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

47.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

48.

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

Cassady, Neal

49.

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

50.

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.