Motivational Quotes

Art

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

- Voznesensky, Andrei

Best Quotes about Art

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

West, Rebecca

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

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

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

10.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

11.

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

Shakespeare, William

12.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

13.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

14.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

15.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

16.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

17.

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

Conrad, Joseph

18.

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

19.

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

Ward Jenkins

20.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

21.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

22.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

23.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

24.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

25.

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

Eliot, T. S.

26.

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

27.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

28.

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

Ben Shahn

29.

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

Piet Mondrian

30.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

36.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

37.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

38.

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

39.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

40.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

41.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

42.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

43.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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