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

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

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

Frye, Northrop

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

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

G. K. Chesterton

10.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

11.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

13.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

14.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

15.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

16.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

17.

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

18.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

19.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

20.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

21.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

22.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

23.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

24.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

25.

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

26.

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

27.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

28.

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

Ward Jenkins

29.

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

30.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

31.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

32.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

36.

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

37.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

38.

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

Ambrose Bierce

39.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

40.

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

Melville, Herman

41.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

43.

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

Kooning, Willem De

44.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

45.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

46.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

47.

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.

48.

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

Yu Cao

49.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

50.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James