Motivational Quotes

Art

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

- Orson Welles

Best Quotes about Art

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

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

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

10.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

11.

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

12.

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

Frye, Northrop

13.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

14.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

15.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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

Connolly, Cyril

17.

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

Jeff Melvoin

18.

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

19.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

20.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

21.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

23.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

24.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

25.

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

Al Capp

26.

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

27.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

28.

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

Ciardi, John

29.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

31.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

34.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

35.

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

Pablo Picasso

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

41.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

42.

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

Midler, Bette

43.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

44.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

45.

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.

46.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

47.

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

Eliot, T. S.

48.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

49.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

50.

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