Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

- Amy Lowell

Best Quotes about Art

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

10.

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

West, Rebecca

11.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

12.

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

Sand, George

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

18.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

19.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

20.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

21.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

22.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

25.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

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

Brown, John Mason

27.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

28.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

29.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

31.

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

32.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

33.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

34.

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

35.

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

36.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

37.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

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

39.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

40.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

41.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

42.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

43.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

44.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

45.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

47.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

48.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

49.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert