Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Stephen Nachmanovitch

Best Quotes about Art

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

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

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

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

Duke Ellington

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

10.

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

11.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

12.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

13.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

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

Anderson, Bill

15.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

16.

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

17.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

18.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

19.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

20.

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

21.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

22.

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

Kennedy, John F.

23.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

24.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

25.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

26.

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

27.

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

Ambrose Bierce

28.

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

29.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

30.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

31.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

32.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

33.

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

34.

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

West, Rebecca

35.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

36.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

37.

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

38.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

39.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

40.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

44.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

45.

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