Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Barney, Natalie Clifford

Best Quotes about Art

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

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

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

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

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

Anderson, Judith

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

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

10.

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

11.

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

Ward Jenkins

12.

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

Schumann, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

20.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

21.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

22.

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

23.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

24.

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

Connolly, Cyril

25.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

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

29.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

30.

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

31.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

32.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

36.

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

37.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

39.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

40.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

41.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

42.

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

43.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

45.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

46.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

47.

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

Picasso, Pablo

48.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

49.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.