Motivational Quotes

Art

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

Best Quotes about Art

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

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

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

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

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

William Baziotes

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

West, Rebecca

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

10.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

11.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

12.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

13.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

14.

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

Proverb, Chinese

15.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

17.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

18.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

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.

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

21.

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

Capp, Al

22.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

23.

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

Kooning, Willem De

24.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

25.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

28.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

29.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

30.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

31.

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

32.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

33.

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

34.

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

35.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

36.

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

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.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

40.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

41.

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

42.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

43.

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

44.

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

45.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

46.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

47.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

48.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

49.

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

50.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.