Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kooning, Willem De

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

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

Piet Mondrian

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

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

10.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

11.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

12.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

13.

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.

14.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

15.

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

16.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

17.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

22.

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

Riding, Laura

23.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

24.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

25.

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.

26.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

31.

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

Eugene Delacroix

32.

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

33.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

34.

Love can heal a broken heart.

35.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

36.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

37.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

38.

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

Peri, Gabriel

39.

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

40.

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

41.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

42.

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

Burroughs, William S.

43.

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

44.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

45.

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

46.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin