Motivational Quotes

Art

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Art

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

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

Gide, Andre

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

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

Walt Whitman

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

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

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

Varese, Edward

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

William Baziotes

14.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Kennedy, John F.

18.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

19.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

20.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

21.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

22.

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

Weil, Simone

23.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

24.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

25.

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

26.

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

Riding, Laura

27.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

28.

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

Eugene Delacroix

29.

Sontag, Susan

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

33.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

35.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

36.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

37.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

41.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

42.

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

Capp, Al

43.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

44.

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

Picasso, Pablo

45.

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

Jackson Pollock

46.

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

47.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

48.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

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

50.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste