Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Voznesensky, Andrei

Best Quotes about Art

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

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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

David Cronenberg

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

Brancusi, Constantin

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

10.

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

Proverb, Chinese

11.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

12.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

13.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

17.

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

Al Capp

18.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

19.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

20.

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

21.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

22.

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

23.

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

William Baziotes

24.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

25.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

26.

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

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

28.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

29.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

30.

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

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

33.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

34.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

35.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

36.

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

Mailer, Norman

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

George Tooker

40.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

41.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

42.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

43.

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

44.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

45.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

46.

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

West, Rebecca

47.

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

48.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

49.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

50.

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