Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Waugh, Evelyn

Best Quotes about Art

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

Schumann, Robert

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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

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.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Camus, Albert

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

10.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

11.

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

George Tooker

12.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

14.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

15.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

16.

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.

Hockney, David

17.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

18.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

19.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

20.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

21.

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

Anderson, Bill

22.

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

Simonides

23.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

26.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

27.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

28.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

29.

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

30.

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.

Mcluhan, Marshall

31.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

32.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

34.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

35.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

36.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

38.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

39.

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

40.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

41.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

42.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

43.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

44.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

45.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

48.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

49.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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