Motivational Quotes

Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

- Berger, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

Woodberry, George E.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Sand, George

10.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

11.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

12.

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

13.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

14.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

15.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

16.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

17.

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

18.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

20.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

21.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

22.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

24.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

25.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

26.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

27.

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

28.

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

Blackie, Professor

29.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

30.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

35.

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

Duke Ellington

36.

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)

37.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

38.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

39.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

40.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

41.

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

42.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

43.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

44.

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

Connolly, Cyril

45.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

46.

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