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

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.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Melville, Herman

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

11.

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

12.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

13.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

14.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

15.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

16.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

17.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

18.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

19.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

21.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

22.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

23.

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

24.

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

25.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

26.

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

Joyce, James

27.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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.

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

Picasso, Pablo

30.

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

Morris, William

31.

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

Anderson, Bill

32.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

33.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

37.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

39.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

40.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

41.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

42.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

43.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

44.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

45.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

46.

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

47.

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

Piero Milani

48.

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.

49.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

50.

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

Shakespeare, William