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

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

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

George Tooker

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

Castaneda, Carlos

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

12.

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

13.

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

G. K. Chesterton

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.

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

Peri, Gabriel

16.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

17.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

18.

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

19.

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

Kennedy, John F.

20.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

21.

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

22.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

26.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

28.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

33.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

36.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

38.

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

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

Frye, Northrop

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

43.

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

Mann, Horace

44.

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

45.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

47.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

48.

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