Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ben Shahn

Best Quotes about Art

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

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

Kael, Pauline

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

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

Novalis

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

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

Barenboim, Daniel

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

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

10.

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

11.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

12.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

13.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

14.

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

15.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

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

Ambrose Bierce

17.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

20.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

21.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

22.

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

23.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

24.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

25.

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

Gutzkow

26.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

27.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

28.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

29.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

30.

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

31.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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)

35.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

36.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

40.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

42.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

44.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

48.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

49.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

50.

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

Edmond de Goncourt