Motivational Quotes

Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

- Berger, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

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

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

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

W. Somerset Maugham

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

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

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

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

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

Thurber, James

10.

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.

11.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

12.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

13.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

14.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

15.

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

16.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

17.

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

18.

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

Yu Cao

19.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

20.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

21.

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

22.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

23.

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

24.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

25.

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

26.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

28.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

29.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

30.

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

31.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

32.

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

33.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

35.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

36.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

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

John F. Kennedy

38.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

41.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

43.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

44.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

45.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

47.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

48.

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

49.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

50.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar