Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ben Shahn

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

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

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

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

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

10.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

11.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

12.

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

13.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

14.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

15.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

16.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

21.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

22.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

23.

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

24.

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

Truman, Harry S

25.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

26.

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

27.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

28.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

29.

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)

30.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

31.

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

32.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

33.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

34.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

35.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

36.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

37.

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

38.

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

Melville, Herman

39.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Ward Jenkins

42.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

44.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

45.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

46.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

47.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

48.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

49.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.