Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Paz, Octavio

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

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

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

Frye, Northrop

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

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

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

Thurber, James

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

10.

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

11.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

12.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

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

Lowell, James Russell

14.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

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

Jeff Melvoin

17.

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

Parker, Theodore

18.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

19.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

20.

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

21.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

22.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

23.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

25.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

26.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

27.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

28.

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

John F. Kennedy

29.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

30.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

31.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

32.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

33.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

34.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

35.

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

Schumann, Robert

36.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

37.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

38.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

39.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

40.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

41.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

42.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

43.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

47.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

48.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

50.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert