Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

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

Brancusi, Constantin

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

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

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

Frost, Robert

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Tynan, Kenneth

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

10.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

11.

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

12.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

14.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

15.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

17.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

18.

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

19.

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

Schumann, Robert

20.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

21.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

22.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

23.

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

24.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

29.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

30.

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

Eliot, T. S.

31.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

32.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

34.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

35.

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

36.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

37.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

38.

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

39.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

40.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

41.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

42.

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

43.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

44.

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

45.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

46.

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

47.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

48.

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

49.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

50.

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