Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Sand, George

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

Tynan, Kenneth

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

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

Piero Milani

10.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

11.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

16.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

17.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

18.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

22.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

23.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

24.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

25.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

26.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

27.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

29.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

30.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

31.

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

32.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

33.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

34.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

35.

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

Riding, Laura

36.

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

37.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

38.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

39.

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

40.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

41.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

42.

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

Eugene Delacroix

43.

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

44.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

45.

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

46.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

48.

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

Shakespeare, William

49.

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