Motivational Quotes

Art

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Art

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

Eugene Delacroix

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

Picasso, Pablo

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

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

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Rosenberg, Harold

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

10.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

11.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

12.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

13.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

14.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

15.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

16.

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

Jeff Melvoin

17.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

18.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

23.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

24.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

25.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

26.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

27.

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

Camus, Albert

28.

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

Cioran, E. M.

29.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

30.

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

31.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

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

33.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

34.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

35.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

36.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

37.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

38.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

39.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

40.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

41.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

42.

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

43.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

44.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

45.

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

46.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

47.

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

48.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

49.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

50.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von