Motivational Quotes

Art

Repetition is the death of art.

- Robin Green

Best Quotes about Art

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

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

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

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

Anderson, Lindsay

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.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

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

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

Ionesco, Eugene

10.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

11.

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

Gill, Eric

12.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

13.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

14.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

15.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

16.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

17.

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

18.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

21.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

22.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

23.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Truman, Harry S

28.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

29.

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

30.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

31.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

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

Simonides

33.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

35.

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

36.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

37.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

38.

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

39.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

40.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

43.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

44.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

45.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

46.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

47.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

48.

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

Blackie, Professor

49.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

50.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis