Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Voznesensky, Andrei

Best Quotes about Art

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

Love can heal a broken heart.

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

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

Burroughs, William S.

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

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

10.

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

11.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

12.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

13.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

18.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

21.

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

22.

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

Mailer, Norman

23.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

24.

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

25.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

26.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

27.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

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.

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

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

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

33.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

34.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

35.

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

36.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

37.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

38.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

39.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

40.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

41.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

42.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

43.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

44.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

45.

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

William Baziotes

46.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

47.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.