Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Jackson Pollock

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

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

Motherwell, Robert

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

13.

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

Connolly, Cyril

14.

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

Andre Gide

15.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

16.

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

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

19.

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

20.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

21.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

22.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

23.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

24.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

25.

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

26.

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

Melville, Herman

27.

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

Riding, Laura

28.

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

29.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

30.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

32.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

33.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

35.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

36.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

38.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

39.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

40.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

41.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

42.

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

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

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.

45.

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

Ward Jenkins

46.

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

Paz, Octavio

47.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

49.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

50.

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.