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

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.

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

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

Riding, Laura

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

10.

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

11.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

12.

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

Thurber, James

13.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

14.

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.

Dahlberg, Edward

15.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

17.

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

David Cronenberg

18.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

19.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

20.

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

21.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

22.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

23.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

24.

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

Andre Gide

25.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

26.

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

Ovid

27.

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

Cather, Willa

28.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

29.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

30.

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

31.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

32.

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

Capp, Al

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

36.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

37.

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

38.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

39.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

40.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

41.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

42.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

43.

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

44.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

45.

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

Shakespeare, William

46.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

47.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.