Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

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

Midler, Bette

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Ward Jenkins

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

10.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

11.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

12.

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.

13.

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

Ovid

14.

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

15.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

16.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

17.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

18.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

19.

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

20.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

21.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

Camus, Albert

23.

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

24.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

25.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

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

Ambrose Bierce

30.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

31.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

32.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

33.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

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.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

36.

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

Ben Shahn

37.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

38.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

39.

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

40.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

42.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

43.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

44.

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

Picasso, Pablo

45.

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

46.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

47.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

48.

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

49.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

50.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric