Inspiring Art Quotes

Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~ Pablo Picasso

Financial security doesn't come from the amount of money you currently have; it comes from your ability to get more of it whenever you want ... Master the art of serving others and you will secure your financial future. ~ Michael Neill

The more you put yourself out there, the more there is for people to take exception with. ~ Lee Hammond

Fear of failure and criticism can be crippling. Don't let others' negativity take away your joy. ~ Lee Hammond

Never put more than two waves in a picture; it's fussy. ~ Winslow Homer

There is never a lack of subject matter; just absence of creativity. ~ Lee Hammond

I think a lot of modern art is complete bullshit. But I admire the creativity. The weird shit people think of! Some of the most interesting things I've ever seen in my life, I've seen in modern art museums. And that's what art is all about. It's supposed to make you think. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

No government can exist without taxation. The money must necessarily be levied on the people; and the grand art consists of levying so as not to oppress. ~ Frederick The Great

Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the starry sky. They were the notes of Oak´s flute. It came from the direction of a small dark object under the hedge - a shephard´s hut - now presenting an outline to which an unintiated person might have been puzzled to attach either meaning or use. ... Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. ... Oak´s motions, though they had a quiet energy, were slow, and their deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied tha his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. His special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static. ... Oak was an intensely human man: indee, his humanity tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been that his flock should end in mutton - that a day could find a shepherd an arrant traitor to his gentle sheep. ~ Thomas Hardy

My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another. ~ Art Linkletter

The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created. ~ Al Alvarez

She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact that she 'took in the English Times and the Saturday Review, and read every word of them,' but it was hinted that the bookshelves that her own capable hands had put up in her bedroom held a large proportion of works of fiction of a startlingly advanced kind, 'and,' it was generally added in tones of mystery, 'many of them French. ~ Edith Somerville

Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person. ~ Pope John Paul II

Art shouldn't be only the aesthetics we hang on the wall, but a dynamic to shape the society. ~ Genco Gulan

Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Even in art, there is no light without shadows, and no shadows are cast without some light. Even the shadow of Adolf Hitler is accompanied by some light. ~ Hans Frank

Art is two things: a search for a road and a search for freedom. ~ Alice Neel

I feel all things as dynamic events, being, changing, and interacting with each other in space and time even as I photograph them. ~ Wynn Bullock

Performance art is really about the sociology of the artist, where ideas come from, and the confluence of those ideas. ~ Roselee Goldberg

There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets. ~ Marsha Norman

Call it walking meditation or a neighborhood stroll; by whatever name
suits you, rediscover the art of meandering. ~ Gina Greenlee

I'm relaxed, Belk. I call it Zen and the art of not giving a shit. ~ Michael Connelly

People can get too heavy and it's just about being heavy, which means there isn't a whole lot of art in that; it's more mechanical. Just always keep in mind that melody is what makes something memorable and if you take that out of the equation then you may have something that's technically played very well, but you still can't lose sight of the song. ~ Jason C. Miller

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant. ~ Joyce Maynard

I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors. ~ John Hench

Acting became important. It became an art that belonged to the actor, not to the director or producer, or the man whose money had bought the studio. It was an art that transformed you into somebody else, that increased your life and mind. I had always loved acting and tried hard to learn it. But with Michael Chekhov, acting became more than a profession to me. It became a sort of religion. ~ Marilyn Monroe

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal ~ Susan Vreeland

Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks, to draw [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. ~ Iannis Xenakis

In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development. ~ Lafcadio Hearn

I once had a drinking contest with an artist on his yacht... It amused him as I took shot after shot, and I realized that this was the reason he'd invited us, his amusement. Looking back, I thought he didn't expect we'd have anything to say, that my questions about the artist's purpose, his existential quest for self in a communally-brutalized past, were not as amusing as they were thought-provoking, but I'll never know. As I swayed like a sailor in drunken bitterness, I felt something had been sacrificed to his art. He'd gone so far out on that boat there was no way for him to come back. I felt he no longer existed and was just the faded intention of color on canvas. His humanity had surely been washed away with the paint thinner. ~ Megan Rich

In essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between pieces, not in the pieces themselves. And simply put, there's a greater conceptual jump from one work of art to the next than from one work of craft to the next. The net result is that art is less polished - but more innovative - than craft. The differences between five Steinway grand pianos - demonstrably works of consummate craftsmanship - are small compared to the differences between the five Beethoven Piano concerti you might perform on those instruments. A ~ David Bayles

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over. ~ Gloria Naylor

Physically, gardens must have boundaries. Mentally, they can reach to the limits of the known universe. The ideas that bestow such vast extent upon gardens derive from sun, earth, art, water, history, civilization, family, anything. ~ Tom Turner

This art of acting is a process I love very much. It's an unbelievably fulfilling experience for me and I look forward to building upon my art in the years to come. ~ Greg Akcelrod

Great art picks up where nature ends. ~ Marc Chagall

Concluding a short series on sin: It is appalling to think of a power so strong that it can annihilate with the irresistible force of its grinding heel; but it is inspiring to consider an Almightiness that transforms the works of evil into the hand-maidens of righteousness and converts the sinner into the saint. And it is this latter power which eternal Love possesses and exhibits. He persistently dwells in the sinner until the sinner wakes up in His likeness and is satisfied with it. ~ Charles Brent

"The work of art must seize upon you ... carry you away." ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I don't play the lottery. I don't care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they're doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don't understand why bridges aren't art. It seems to me they're penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that's a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it's infrastructure. That makes no sense. ~ Max Barry

I think making any art requires a certain degree of high anxiety and total abandon. ~ David Crabb

Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee are my masters; they're the inspiration for my work. Bruce Lee was a heavy fighter who threw hard punches. Jackie moves very fast and uses a lot of comedy, and Jet Li is very fluid. I've tried to combine all of their styles and added some things of my own ~ Tatchakorn Yeerum

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles ... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation. ~ Hans Hofmann

There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man. ~ Alan Paton

And when this power [Richard Dehmel's poetic power], coursing through his being, reaches his sexuality, it doesn't find quite the pure human being it needs. The world of sexuality it finds is not entirely mature and pure, it is not human enough, only virile, rut, intoxication, restlessness, and weighed down by the old prejudices and arrogance with which men have disfigured and overburdened love. Because he loves only as a man, not as a human being, there is in his sense of sexuality something narrow, seemingly savage, hateful, time-bound, uneternal that diminishes his art and makes it ambivalent and doubtful. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Eyes so transparent that through them the soul is seen. ~ Theophile Gautier

Ideas matter - and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible. ~ Sam Harris

Fashion: a beautiful thing that becomes ugly. Art: an ugly thing that becomes beautiful. ~ Coco Chanel