Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

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

Edmond de Goncourt

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

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

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Pablo Picasso

10.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

11.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

12.

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

13.

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

Ben Shahn

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

16.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

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

19.

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

Joyce, James

20.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

21.

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

22.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

25.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

26.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

27.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

28.

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

29.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

30.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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

Schumann, Robert

32.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

33.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

34.

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

35.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

36.

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

Varese, Edward

37.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

38.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

39.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

41.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

46.

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

47.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

48.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

49.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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

Eliot, T. S.