Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

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

Blackie, Professor

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

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

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

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

Love can heal a broken heart.

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

Cioran, E. M.

10.

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

11.

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

Kempis, Thomas

12.

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

13.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

14.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

15.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

16.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

17.

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

18.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

19.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

20.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

21.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

22.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

23.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

24.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

Anderson, Judith

26.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

27.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

28.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

29.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

30.

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

Al Capp

31.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

32.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

33.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

38.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

39.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

Berle, Adolf

41.

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

John F. Kennedy

42.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

43.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

44.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

45.

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

46.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

47.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

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

Eliot, T. S.

49.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

50.

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