Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Kennedy, John F.

Best Quotes about Art

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

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

Castaneda, Carlos

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

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

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

10.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

11.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

12.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

13.

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.

14.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

15.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

16.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

17.

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

18.

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

Kooning, Willem De

19.

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

Ben Shahn

20.

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

21.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

22.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

23.

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

Ovid

24.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

26.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

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

Ovid

28.

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

Kennedy, John F.

29.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

30.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

31.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

32.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

33.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

34.

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

35.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

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.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

38.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

39.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

40.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

45.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

46.

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

Motherwell, Robert

47.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

48.

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.