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 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

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

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

Pascal, Blaise

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

Ben Shahn

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

Piet Mondrian

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

10.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

11.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

12.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

13.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

14.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

15.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

16.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

18.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

19.

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

Picasso, Pablo

20.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

21.

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

22.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

23.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

24.

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

Proust, Marcel

25.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

26.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

27.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

29.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

30.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

31.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

32.

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

West, Rebecca

33.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

34.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

36.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

37.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

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

39.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

40.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

41.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

42.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

43.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

44.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

45.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

46.

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

Warhol, Andy

47.

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

Murdoch, Iris

48.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

49.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

50.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John