Motivational Quotes

Art

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

10.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

11.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

12.

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

13.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

20.

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

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.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

25.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

26.

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

27.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

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

Ciardi, John

29.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

30.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

31.

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

Joyce, James

32.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

33.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

34.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

35.

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

36.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

37.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

38.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

39.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

40.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

48.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

49.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

50.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry