Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Saint-Victor, Richard of

Best Quotes about Art

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

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

Ionesco, Eugene

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

11.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

13.

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

Piero Milani

14.

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

Gill, Eric

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.

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

Piet Mondrian

17.

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

Gide, Andre

18.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

19.

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

Kennedy, John F.

20.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

21.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

22.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

23.

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

24.

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

West, Rebecca

25.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

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

27.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

28.

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

29.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

30.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

31.

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

32.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

34.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

35.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

36.

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

37.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

38.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

39.

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

Parker, Theodore

40.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

41.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

42.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

43.

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

44.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

45.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

46.

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

47.

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

Berle, Adolf

48.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

50.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen