Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

- Bowen, Elizabeth

Best Quotes about Art

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

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

10.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

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

Novalis

12.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

13.

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

Updike, John

14.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

15.

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

Capp, Al

16.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

17.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

19.

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

Anderson, Judith

20.

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

Yu Cao

21.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

22.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

23.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

24.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

25.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

26.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

29.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

30.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

31.

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

Sand, George

32.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

33.

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

34.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

Piero Milani

36.

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

37.

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

38.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

39.

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

Murdoch, Iris

40.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

41.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

42.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

43.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

44.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

45.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

46.

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

47.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

48.

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

49.

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

Andre Gide

50.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques