Motivational Quotes

Art

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

- Stephen Nachmanovitch

Best Quotes about Art

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

Weil, Simone

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Ciardi, John

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

Riding, Laura

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

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

10.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

11.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

12.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

13.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

14.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

15.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

16.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

17.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

18.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

19.

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

20.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

21.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

22.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

23.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

24.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

25.

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

26.

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

Kennedy, John F.

27.

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

28.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

32.

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

33.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

34.

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

Anderson, Bill

35.

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

36.

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

Proverb

37.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

38.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

39.

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

Picasso, Pablo

40.

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

41.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

42.

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

43.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

44.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

45.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

46.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

47.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

48.

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

Kael, Pauline

49.

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

Pascal, Blaise

50.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James