Motivational Quotes

Art

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

- Rich, Adrienne

Best Quotes about Art

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Simonides

10.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

11.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

12.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

13.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

14.

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

Proust, Marcel

15.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

16.

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

Morris, William

17.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

21.

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

22.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

23.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

24.

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

Kael, Pauline

25.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

29.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

30.

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

31.

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

Schumann, Robert

32.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

33.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

34.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

35.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

36.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

37.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

38.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

39.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

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

Gill, Eric

42.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

43.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

44.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

45.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

46.

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