Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

- Paul Gauguin

Best Quotes about Art

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

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

Bangs, Lester

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

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

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

Paz, Octavio

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

Andre Gide

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

10.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

11.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

12.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

17.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

18.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

19.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

22.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

23.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

24.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

25.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

26.

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

27.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

28.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

29.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

30.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

31.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

33.

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

34.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

35.

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

36.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

37.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

38.

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

39.

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

Blackie, Professor

40.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

41.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

42.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

44.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

46.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

47.

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

48.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

49.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?