Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Thurber, James

Best Quotes about Art

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.

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

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

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

Wordsworth, William

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

10.

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

11.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

13.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

14.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

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

Ben Shahn

16.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

17.

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

18.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

19.

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

Thurber, James

20.

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

21.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

22.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

23.

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

Ciardi, John

24.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

26.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

27.

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

Ruskin, John

28.

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

Warhol, Andy

29.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

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

Eliot, T. S.

35.

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

36.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

37.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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

39.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

40.

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

41.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

43.

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

Anderson, Bill

44.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

45.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

46.

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

47.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

48.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

49.

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

Duke Ellington

50.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker