Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Paz, Octavio

Best Quotes about Art

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

David Cronenberg

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

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

Eliot, T. S.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

10.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

11.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

12.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

14.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

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

16.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

17.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

18.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

19.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

20.

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

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

23.

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

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.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

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

Proust, Marcel

27.

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

Connolly, Cyril

28.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

29.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

30.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

31.

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

32.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

33.

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

34.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

35.

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

Zola, Emile

36.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

37.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

38.

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

Shakespeare, William

39.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

40.

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

41.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

42.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

43.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

44.

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

45.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

46.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

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

Proverb, Chinese

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Berle, Adolf

50.

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