Motivational Quotes

Art

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Art

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

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

Kooning, Willem De

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

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

Moses, Grandma

10.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

11.

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

12.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

13.

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

Frye, Northrop

14.

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

15.

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

Parker, Dorothy

16.

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

17.

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

Gutzkow

18.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

19.

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

20.

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

Ovid

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

24.

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

Conrad, Joseph

25.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

26.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

27.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

28.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

29.

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

Isak Dineson

30.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

31.

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

Yu Cao

32.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

33.

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

Ruskin, John

34.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

35.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

37.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

38.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

39.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

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

Camus, Albert

41.

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

West, Rebecca

42.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

43.

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

Burroughs, William S.

44.

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

45.

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

Walt Whitman

46.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

47.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

48.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

49.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

50.

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