Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- William Baziotes

Best Quotes about Art

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

Al Capp

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

10.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

11.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

13.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

14.

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.

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

17.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

18.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

19.

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

20.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

21.

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

22.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

23.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

24.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

25.

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

26.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

27.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

28.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

29.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

30.

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

Warhol, Andy

31.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

33.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

34.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

35.

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

36.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

37.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

38.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

39.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

40.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

41.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

42.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

43.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

44.

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

45.

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

46.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

47.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

49.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

50.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y