Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Artists

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German Literary and Marxist Critic

Caricature is rough truth.
George Meredith (1828–1909) British Novelist, Poet, Critic

With an apple I will astonish Paris.
Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) French Painter

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Northrop Frye

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.
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian Novelist

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) Irish Novelist, Short-story Writer

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.
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) American Poet, Educator, Academic

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) American-British Essayist, Bibliophile

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish Painter, Sculptor, Artist

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
Vaclav Havel (1936–2011) Czech Dramatist, Statesman

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.
Andre Breton (1896–1966) French Poet, Essayist, Critic

If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.
Grandma Moses (1860–1961) American Painter, Artist

Art is the most passionate orgy within man’s grasp.
John Donne (1572–1631) English Poet, Cleric

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist Painter

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.
Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) Italian-born French Poet, Playwright

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.
Duke Ellington (1899–1974) American Jazz Pianist, Composer, Bandleader

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish Novelist, Poet

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.
Kenneth Tynan (1927–80) English Theatre Critic, Writer

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German Poet, Dramatist

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.
David Hockney (b.1937) English Painter, Draughtsman

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American Writer

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French Sculptor

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British Novelist

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
Salvador Dali (1904–89) Spanish Painter

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.
Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-American Novelist

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian Dissident Novelist

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