Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

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

10.

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

Ciardi, John

11.

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

Picasso, Pablo

12.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

13.

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

14.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

15.

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

16.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

18.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

19.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

21.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

22.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

25.

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

Conrad, Joseph

26.

Trocchi, Alexander

27.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

28.

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

29.

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

Murdoch, Iris

30.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

31.

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

32.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

34.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

35.

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

Mann, Horace

36.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

37.

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

38.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

39.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

40.

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

Piet Mondrian

41.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

42.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

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

44.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Thurber, James

48.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

49.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

50.

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

Burroughs, William S.