Motivational Quotes

Art

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

- Beecher, Henry Ward

Best Quotes about Art

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

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

Anderson, Judith

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

Novalis

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

Frye, Northrop

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

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

Arp, Jean

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

10.

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

Parker, Dorothy

11.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

14.

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

15.

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

Blackie, Professor

16.

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

17.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

18.

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

19.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

20.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

21.

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

Murdoch, Iris

22.

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

Bellow, Saul

23.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

24.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

25.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

26.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

27.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

28.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

29.

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

G. K. Chesterton

30.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

31.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

Thurber, James

33.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

34.

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

Burroughs, William S.

35.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

36.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

37.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

38.

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

Jacob, Max

39.

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

40.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

41.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

42.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

43.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

45.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

46.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

47.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

48.

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

Sand, George

49.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

50.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin