Motivational Quotes

Art

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

- Miguel de Cervantes

Best Quotes about Art

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Jackson Pollock

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Howe, Nathaniel

10.

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

11.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

12.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

13.

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

Bangs, Lester

14.

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

15.

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

16.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

17.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

18.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

23.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

24.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

25.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

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

Pablo Picasso

29.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

30.

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

Proverb

31.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

32.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

33.

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

Paz, Octavio

34.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

35.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

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.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

42.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

43.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

44.

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

45.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

46.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

48.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

49.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

50.

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

Burroughs, William S.