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

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

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

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

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

10.

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

Blackie, Professor

11.

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

12.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

M. C. Richards

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

17.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

18.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

19.

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

20.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

21.

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

Kooning, Willem De

22.

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

Gill, Eric

23.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

24.

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

Burroughs, William S.

25.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

26.

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

Anderson, Bill

27.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

28.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

29.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

30.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

31.

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

32.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

33.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

34.

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

David Cronenberg

35.

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

Bangs, Lester

36.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

37.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

38.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

39.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

40.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

41.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

42.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

43.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

45.

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

46.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

47.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

48.

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

Isak Dineson

49.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

50.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean