Motivational Quotes

Art

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

- Trotsky, Leon

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Sand, George

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

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

Cassady, Neal

10.

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

Peri, Gabriel

11.

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

Parker, Dorothy

12.

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

Anderson, Judith

13.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

14.

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

Novalis

15.

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

Kennedy, John F.

16.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

17.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

18.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

20.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

21.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

22.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

23.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

24.

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

Mailer, Norman

25.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

26.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

27.

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

Ovid

28.

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

Ambrose Bierce

29.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

30.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

31.

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

Thurber, James

32.

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

Shakespeare, William

33.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

34.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

35.

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

Ben Shahn

36.

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

Brown, John Mason

37.

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

38.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

40.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

41.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

42.

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

Proverb

43.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

46.

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

47.

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

Ciardi, John

48.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

49.

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