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

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

Camus, Albert

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

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

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

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

10.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

11.

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

12.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

14.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

15.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Gill, Eric

18.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

19.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

20.

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

21.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

22.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

24.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

25.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

26.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

27.

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

John F. Kennedy

28.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

29.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

30.

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

Varese, Edward

31.

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

32.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

36.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

37.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

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

39.

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

David Cronenberg

40.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

41.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

42.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

43.

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

Kennedy, John F.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

48.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

49.

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