Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Shaw, George Bernard

Best Quotes about Art

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

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

Ruckett

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

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

10.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

11.

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

Piet Mondrian

12.

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

13.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

14.

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

Weil, Simone

15.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

16.

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

Peri, Gabriel

17.

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

Riding, Laura

18.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

21.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

22.

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

23.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

27.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

28.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

29.

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

Warhol, Andy

30.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

33.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

34.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

35.

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

Eliot, T. S.

36.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

40.

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

Parker, Theodore

41.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

42.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

43.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

44.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

45.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

46.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

47.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

48.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

49.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

50.

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