Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

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

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

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

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

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

10.

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

Capp, Al

11.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

12.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

13.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

14.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

15.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

16.

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

17.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

18.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

19.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

20.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

21.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

22.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

23.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

25.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

26.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

27.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

28.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

29.

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

Paz, Octavio

30.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

Duke Ellington

34.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

35.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

36.

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

Proust, Marcel

37.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

38.

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

39.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

40.

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

Updike, John

41.

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

Jackson Pollock

42.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

43.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

44.

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

45.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

46.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

47.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

48.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

49.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

50.

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