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

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

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

Jovovich, Milla

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

David Cronenberg

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

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

Novalis

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

10.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

11.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

12.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

13.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

14.

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

15.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

16.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

22.

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

23.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

24.

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

25.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

26.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

27.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

28.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

29.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

30.

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

31.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

32.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

33.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

34.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

35.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

36.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

37.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

38.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

40.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

41.

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

Al Capp

42.

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

43.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

44.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

46.

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

Wilson, Robert

47.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

48.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Cather, Willa

50.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal