Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Renoir, Pierre Auguste

Best Quotes about Art

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

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.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

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

William Baziotes

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

10.

Love can heal a broken heart.

11.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

12.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

13.

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

14.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

15.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

16.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

17.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

18.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

19.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

Keller, Helen

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

23.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

24.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

26.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

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

Kennedy, John F.

31.

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

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

33.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

34.

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

35.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

36.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

39.

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

40.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

41.

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

Kooning, Willem De

42.

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

David Cronenberg

43.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

46.

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

47.

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

48.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

49.

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

Kael, Pauline

50.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal