Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

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

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

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Eugene Delacroix

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.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

10.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

11.

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

Kooning, Willem De

12.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

13.

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.

14.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

15.

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

Kennedy, John F.

16.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

17.

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

18.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

19.

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

20.

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

Cather, Willa

21.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

22.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

23.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

24.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

25.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

26.

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

27.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

29.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

30.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

31.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

32.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

33.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

36.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

37.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

39.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

40.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

41.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

43.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

44.

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

45.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

46.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

47.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

48.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

49.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

50.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc