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

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

Isak Dineson

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

Capp, Al

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Kennedy, John F.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

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

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

Kooning, Willem De

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

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

10.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

11.

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

Parker, Dorothy

12.

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

Mann, Horace

13.

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

14.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

15.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

16.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

17.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

18.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

19.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

20.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

21.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

23.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

24.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

25.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

26.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Warhol, Andy

30.

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.

31.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Ovid

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

38.

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

39.

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

40.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

41.

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

42.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

44.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

45.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

46.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

47.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

48.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

49.

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