Motivational Quotes

Art

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

- Paglia, Camille

Best Quotes about Art

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

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

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

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

Ciardi, John

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

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

11.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

14.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

15.

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

Melville, Herman

16.

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

17.

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

Picasso, Pablo

18.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

19.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

24.

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

25.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

27.

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

Proverb, Chinese

28.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

29.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

31.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

32.

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

33.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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

38.

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

Thurber, James

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

41.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

42.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

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

Proust, Marcel

45.

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

46.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

47.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

48.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

49.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

50.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker