Motivational Quotes

Art

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

- Elizabeth Aston

Best Quotes about Art

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

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

Henry Ward Beecher

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

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

Holyfield, Evander

10.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

11.

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

12.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

14.

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

15.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

16.

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

Midler, Bette

17.

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

Murdoch, Iris

18.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

19.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

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

21.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

22.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

23.

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

24.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

25.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

27.

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

Chopra, Deepak

28.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

31.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

32.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

33.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

34.

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

Driscoll, Louise

35.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

36.

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

37.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

38.

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

39.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

40.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

41.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

42.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

43.

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.

Ruskin, John

44.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

45.

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

46.

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

47.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

48.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

49.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

50.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.