Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

- Sand, George

Best Quotes about 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

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

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

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

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

Jovovich, Milla

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

10.

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

Berle, Adolf

11.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

12.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

13.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

14.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

15.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

16.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

17.

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

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

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

20.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

21.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

22.

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

23.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

26.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

27.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

28.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

29.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

30.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

31.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

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

Piet Mondrian

44.

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

Picasso, Pablo

45.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

46.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

47.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

Anderson, Bill

49.

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

50.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra