Motivational Quotes

Art

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

- Ginsberg, Allen

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

10.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

11.

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

Joyce, James

12.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

13.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

14.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

16.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

17.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

18.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

20.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

21.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

22.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

23.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

24.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

28.

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

David Cronenberg

29.

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

30.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

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

Bangs, Lester

32.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

33.

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

34.

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

Sand, George

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.

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

Jackson Pollock

37.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

38.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

39.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

40.

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

41.

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

G. K. Chesterton

42.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

44.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

45.

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

46.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

47.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

48.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

49.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

50.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason