Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

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

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

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

Bangs, Lester

10.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

11.

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

Piero Milani

12.

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

West, Rebecca

13.

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

14.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Churchill, Winston

18.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

19.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

20.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

21.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

22.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

23.

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

Walt Whitman

24.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

Ambrose Bierce

26.

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

Brown, John Mason

27.

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

28.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

30.

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

Capp, Al

31.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

35.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

36.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

37.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

38.

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

Connolly, Cyril

39.

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

40.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

41.

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

42.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

43.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

47.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

48.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

49.

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

Kennedy, John F.

50.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert