Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

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

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

Holyfield, Evander

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.

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

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

11.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

12.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

13.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

14.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

18.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Brown, John Mason

22.

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

Ciardi, John

23.

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

Bangs, Lester

24.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

25.

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.

26.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

28.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

29.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

31.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

32.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

33.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

34.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

35.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

36.

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

37.

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

Churchill, Winston

38.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

39.

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

40.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

41.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

42.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

43.

Love can heal a broken heart.

44.

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

Eugene Delacroix

45.

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

46.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

47.

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

Parker, Dorothy

48.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

49.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.