Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- West, Rebecca

Best Quotes about Art

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

Elizabeth Bowen

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

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

11.

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

12.

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

Al Capp

13.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

14.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

15.

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

16.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

17.

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

18.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

19.

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

Schumann, Robert

20.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

21.

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

Moses, Grandma

22.

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

23.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

24.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

25.

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

26.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

31.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

32.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

33.

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

34.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

36.

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

Warhol, Andy

37.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

38.

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

39.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

40.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

41.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

42.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

46.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

47.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

48.

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

Walt Whitman

49.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.