Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Love can heal a broken heart.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

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

Thurber, James

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

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

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

11.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

12.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

13.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

14.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

15.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

16.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

17.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

18.

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

19.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

20.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

21.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

22.

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

23.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

24.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

26.

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

27.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

28.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

29.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

30.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

32.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

33.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

34.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

35.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

37.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

39.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

43.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

44.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

45.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

46.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

48.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

49.

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

Eliot, T. S.

50.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.