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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

G. K. Chesterton

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

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.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

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

10.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

11.

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

12.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

17.

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

Kennedy, John F.

18.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

19.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

20.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

21.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

25.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

26.

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

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.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

29.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

30.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

31.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

32.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

37.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

38.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

39.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

40.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

41.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

42.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

45.

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

Jeff Melvoin

46.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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