Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Kooning, Willem De

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

Cather, Willa

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

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

Castaneda, Carlos

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

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

10.

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

Burroughs, William S.

11.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

12.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

13.

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

Frye, Northrop

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

16.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

17.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

18.

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

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

22.

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.

23.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

24.

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

25.

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

Mann, Horace

26.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

27.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

29.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

30.

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

31.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

32.

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

David Cronenberg

33.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

34.

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

35.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

36.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

37.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

38.

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

Ciardi, John

39.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

40.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

41.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

42.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

43.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

44.

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

45.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

46.

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

47.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

48.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

49.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

50.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.