Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Waugh, Evelyn

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

Cioran, E. M.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

10.

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.

Charles Rosin

11.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

12.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

13.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

14.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

15.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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.

17.

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

18.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Ruskin, John

22.

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.

23.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

24.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

25.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

David Cronenberg

28.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

29.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

30.

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

Al Capp

31.

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

Eliot, T. S.

32.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

33.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

34.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

38.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

39.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

40.

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

West, Rebecca

41.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

42.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

43.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

45.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

46.

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

47.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

48.

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

Paz, Octavio

49.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

50.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.