Motivational Quotes

Art

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

- Parker, Dorothy

Best Quotes about Art

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

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

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

10.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

11.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

12.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

14.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

16.

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

17.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

19.

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

20.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

21.

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.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

22.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

23.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

25.

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

26.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

27.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

28.

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

Murdoch, Iris

29.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

30.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

31.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

32.

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

Pablo Picasso

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

36.

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

37.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

38.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

40.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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

42.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

43.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

44.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

45.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

47.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

48.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

49.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

50.

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