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

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

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

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

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

Frye, Northrop

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

10.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

11.

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

M. C. Richards

12.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

13.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

14.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

15.

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

16.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

17.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

18.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

19.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

20.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

21.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

25.

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

26.

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

Peri, Gabriel

27.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

28.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

29.

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

30.

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

Isak Dineson

31.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

Motherwell, Robert

33.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

38.

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

39.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

40.

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

41.

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

Picasso, Pablo

42.

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.

43.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

44.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

45.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

46.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

47.

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

48.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

49.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

50.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo