Motivational Quotes

Art

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

- Berle, Adolf

Best Quotes about Art

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

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

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

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

Pablo Picasso

14.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

15.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

16.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

17.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

18.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

19.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

21.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

24.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

28.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

29.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

30.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

32.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

33.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

35.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Bible

37.

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

38.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

39.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

40.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

41.

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

Sand, George

42.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

44.

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

45.

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

46.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

47.

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

Updike, John

48.

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

49.

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