Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

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

10.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

11.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

12.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

14.

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

Ruckett

15.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

18.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

19.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

20.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

21.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

22.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

23.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

24.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

25.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

26.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

27.

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

28.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

29.

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

Connolly, Cyril

30.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

31.

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

Piet Mondrian

32.

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

Kennedy, John F.

33.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

34.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

35.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

36.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

37.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Joyce, James

44.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

45.

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

46.

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

Schumann, Robert

47.

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

Jeff Melvoin

48.

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

Riding, Laura

49.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

50.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella