Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

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

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

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

Moses, Grandma

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

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

Rosenberg, Harold

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

10.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

11.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

12.

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

13.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

14.

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

15.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

20.

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

21.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

22.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

23.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

24.

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.

25.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

26.

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

Ciardi, John

27.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

28.

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

Connolly, Cyril

29.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Warhol, Andy

31.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

34.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

35.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

36.

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

37.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

38.

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

Parker, Dorothy

39.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

40.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

46.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

48.

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

49.

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

Truman, Harry S

50.

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