Motivational Quotes

Art

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

- Kael, Pauline

Best Quotes about Art

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

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

Pablo Picasso

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

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

Frye, Northrop

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

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

Weil, Simone

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

Piero Milani

10.

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

Warhol, Andy

11.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

12.

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

13.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

14.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

15.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

16.

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

Wilson, Robert

17.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

18.

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

19.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

20.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

21.

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

22.

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

Pascal, Blaise

23.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

24.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

25.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

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

27.

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

Capp, Al

28.

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

29.

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

Piet Mondrian

30.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

31.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

32.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

33.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

34.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

35.

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

36.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

37.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

38.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

39.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

40.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

41.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

42.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

43.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

44.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

45.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

46.

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

Midler, Bette

47.

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

48.

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

Cioran, E. M.

49.

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

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