Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Proust, Marcel

Best Quotes about Art

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

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 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

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

Schumann, Robert

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

10.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

11.

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

Connolly, Cyril

12.

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

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

15.

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

Jeff Melvoin

16.

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

Kael, Pauline

17.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

18.

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

Camus, Albert

19.

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.

20.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

21.

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

Bangs, Lester

22.

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

23.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

24.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

25.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

31.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

32.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

33.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

34.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

35.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

36.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

37.

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

38.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

39.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

40.

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

Midler, Bette

41.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

42.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

43.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

44.

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

Ovid

45.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

46.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

47.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

48.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

49.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

50.

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