Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Kooning, Willem De

Best Quotes about Art

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Gill, Eric

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Kael, Pauline

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

10.

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

Riding, Laura

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

14.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

15.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

16.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

17.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

18.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

19.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

20.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

21.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

22.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

24.

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

25.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

27.

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

28.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

29.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

30.

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

Kennedy, John F.

31.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

32.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

33.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

35.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

36.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

37.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

38.

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

Mailer, Norman

39.

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

40.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

41.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

42.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

43.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

44.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

45.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

46.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

47.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

49.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

50.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold