Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

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

Al Capp

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

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

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

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

10.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

11.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

13.

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

14.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

15.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

16.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

17.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

18.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

19.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

20.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

21.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

22.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

23.

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

Kooning, Willem De

24.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

25.

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

William Baziotes

26.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

G. K. Chesterton

30.

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

31.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

32.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

36.

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

37.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

38.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

39.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

40.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

41.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

42.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

43.

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.

44.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

45.

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

46.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

47.

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

Moses, Grandma

48.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

49.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

50.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders