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

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

Camus, Albert

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

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

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

Andre Gide

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

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

Motherwell, Robert

10.

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

11.

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

Anderson, Bill

12.

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

13.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

14.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

15.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

16.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

17.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

19.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

20.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

21.

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

22.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

23.

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

24.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

25.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

26.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

27.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

28.

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

29.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

30.

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

31.

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

Truman, Harry S

32.

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

33.

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

Cather, Willa

34.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

35.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

36.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

37.

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

38.

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.

Chagall, Marc

39.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

40.

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

41.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

42.

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

43.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

45.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

46.

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