Motivational Quotes

Art

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

- Menzies, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Capp, Al

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

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

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

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

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

10.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

11.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

15.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

16.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

18.

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

19.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

20.

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

Parker, Dorothy

21.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

22.

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

Ambrose Bierce

23.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

24.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

25.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

26.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

28.

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

29.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

30.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

31.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

32.

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

John F. Kennedy

33.

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

34.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

35.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

36.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

37.

Menzies, Robert

38.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

39.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

40.

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

41.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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.

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

44.

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

45.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

46.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

47.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

48.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

49.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

50.

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.