Motivational Quotes

Art

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

- Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Best Quotes about Art

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

10.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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.

Havel, Vaclav

14.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

15.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

16.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

17.

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

George Tooker

18.

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

Truman, Harry S

19.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

20.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

22.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

23.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

24.

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

25.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

26.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

28.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

29.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

30.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

31.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

32.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

33.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

34.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

35.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

Mailer, Norman

37.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

38.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

39.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

40.

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

Murdoch, Iris

41.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

42.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

43.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

44.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

45.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

46.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

47.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

48.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

49.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

50.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin