Motivational Quotes

Art

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

- Woodberry, George E.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

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

Warhol, Andy

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

Ginsberg, Allen

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

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.

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

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

10.

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

11.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

12.

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

George Tooker

13.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

14.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

15.

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

16.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

17.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

18.

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

G. K. Chesterton

19.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

20.

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

Bangs, Lester

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

26.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

27.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

28.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

29.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

30.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

31.

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

Driscoll, Louise

32.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

33.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

34.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

35.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

36.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

37.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

38.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

39.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

40.

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

Riding, Laura

41.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

42.

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

43.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

44.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

45.

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

Walt Whitman

46.

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.

47.

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

48.

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

Ciardi, John

49.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

50.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann