Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ward Jenkins

Best Quotes about Art

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

Proverb

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

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

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

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

10.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

11.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

12.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

13.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

14.

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

15.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

16.

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

17.

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

18.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

19.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

20.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

21.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

22.

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

John F. Kennedy

23.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

24.

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

Cioran, E. M.

25.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

26.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

27.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

28.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

29.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

30.

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

Eliot, T. S.

31.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

32.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

33.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

34.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

35.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

36.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

37.

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

38.

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

Peri, Gabriel

39.

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

Conrad, Joseph

40.

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

George Tooker

41.

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.

42.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

43.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

44.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

45.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

46.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Paz, Octavio

50.

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

Edith Wharton