Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Art

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

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

John F. Kennedy

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

10.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

11.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

12.

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

Connolly, Cyril

13.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

18.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

19.

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

20.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

21.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

22.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

23.

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

24.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

25.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

26.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

27.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

31.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

32.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

33.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

35.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

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

Eugene Delacroix

37.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

38.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

39.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

40.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

41.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

42.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

43.

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

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

46.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

47.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

48.

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

West, Rebecca

49.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

50.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren