Motivational Quotes

Art

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Art

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

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

Gutzkow

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

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

Ward Jenkins

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

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

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

11.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

12.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

13.

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

14.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

15.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

16.

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

17.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

20.

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

Burroughs, William S.

21.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

22.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

23.

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

24.

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

Mailer, Norman

25.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

26.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

27.

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

28.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

29.

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

Anderson, Judith

30.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

31.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

32.

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

Riding, Laura

33.

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

34.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

35.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

36.

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

Pablo Picasso

37.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

38.

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

Ciardi, John

39.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

40.

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

41.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

42.

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

Al Capp

43.

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

Paz, Octavio

44.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

45.

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

46.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

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

Proverb, Chinese

48.

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