Motivational Quotes

Art

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

- Piet Mondrian

Best Quotes about Art

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

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

10.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

11.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

12.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

13.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

14.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

15.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

16.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

17.

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

18.

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

Frye, Northrop

19.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

21.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

22.

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

23.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

24.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

26.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

27.

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

Klee, Paul

28.

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

Peri, Gabriel

29.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

30.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

31.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

32.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

33.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

35.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

36.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

37.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

38.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

39.

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.

40.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

41.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

42.

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

Proust, Marcel

43.

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

44.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

45.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

50.

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