Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Best Quotes about Art

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

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

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

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

Picasso, Pablo

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

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.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

10.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

11.

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

Connolly, Cyril

12.

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

Weil, Simone

13.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

14.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.

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

16.

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

17.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

18.

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

19.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

20.

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

21.

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

Al Capp

22.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

25.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

26.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

27.

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

28.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

29.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

30.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

31.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

32.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

33.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

34.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

35.

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.

36.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

37.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Ward Jenkins

40.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

41.

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

42.

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

Cather, Willa

43.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

44.

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

45.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

46.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

47.

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

Simonides

48.

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

John F. Kennedy

49.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

50.

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