Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kooning, Willem De

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

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 skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

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

Pablo Picasso

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

10.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

11.

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

12.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

13.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

14.

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

Andre Gide

15.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

16.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

17.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

18.

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

19.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

20.

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

Walt Whitman

21.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

22.

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

Camus, Albert

23.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

24.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

25.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

26.

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

Parker, Theodore

27.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

28.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

29.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

30.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

31.

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

32.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

33.

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

Ciardi, John

34.

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

Proust, Marcel

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

38.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

39.

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

Eugene Delacroix

40.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

41.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

42.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

43.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

44.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

45.

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

Proverb, Chinese

46.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

47.

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

Thurber, James

48.

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

49.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

50.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor