Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

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

Proverb

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

Jackson Pollock

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

Warhol, Andy

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

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

Capp, Al

11.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

12.

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

Kooning, Willem De

13.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

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

15.

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

16.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

20.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

21.

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

22.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

23.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

24.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

25.

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

26.

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

David Cronenberg

27.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

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

Al Capp

29.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

30.

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

Truman, Harry S

31.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

32.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

33.

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

34.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

35.

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

36.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

37.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

38.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

40.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

41.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

43.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

44.

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

Parker, Dorothy

45.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

47.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

48.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

49.

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

50.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.