Motivational Quotes

Art

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

- Aristophanes

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

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

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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

Walt Whitman

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

10.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

11.

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

12.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

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)

14.

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

Kooning, Willem De

15.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

16.

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.

17.

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

Schumann, Robert

18.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

19.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

20.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

21.

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

22.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

23.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

24.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

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

26.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

27.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

28.

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

John F. Kennedy

29.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

30.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

31.

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

Moses, Grandma

32.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

33.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

34.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

35.

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

Driscoll, Louise

36.

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.

37.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

38.

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

Mailer, Norman

39.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

40.

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

Murdoch, Iris

41.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

42.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

43.

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

Keller, Helen

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

47.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

48.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

49.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.