Motivational Quotes

Art

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

- Wordsworth, William

Best Quotes about Art

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

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

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

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

10.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

11.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

12.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

13.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

14.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

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

16.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

17.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

Piet Mondrian

19.

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

20.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

21.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

22.

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

23.

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

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.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

26.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

27.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

29.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

30.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

31.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

32.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

33.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

34.

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

35.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

36.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

37.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

38.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

39.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

40.

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

41.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

42.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

43.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

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

45.

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

Moses, Grandma

46.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

47.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

48.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

49.

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

Warhol, Andy

50.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren