Motivational Quotes

Art

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

- Joseph Chilton Pearce

Best Quotes about Art

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

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

West, Rebecca

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

Mann, Horace

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

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

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

10.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

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.

13.

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

Pascal, Blaise

14.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

15.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

16.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

17.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

18.

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

19.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

20.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

21.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

22.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

24.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

25.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

26.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

27.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

28.

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

Ciardi, John

29.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

31.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

32.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

33.

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

34.

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

Schumann, Robert

35.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

36.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Gill, Eric

38.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

39.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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.

41.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

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

Cather, Willa

43.

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

44.

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

45.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

46.

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

47.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

48.

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

49.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

50.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore