Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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

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

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

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

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

11.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

12.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

13.

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

14.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

15.

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

16.

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

Chopra, Deepak

17.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

19.

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

20.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

21.

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.

22.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

23.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

24.

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

Driscoll, Louise

25.

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

26.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

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

28.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

29.

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

30.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

31.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

32.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

33.

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

Holyfield, Evander

34.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

35.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

36.

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

37.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

38.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

39.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

41.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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

Peri, Gabriel

43.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

44.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

45.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

46.

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.

47.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

48.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

49.

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

50.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris