Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

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

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

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.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

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

11.

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

Ambrose Bierce

12.

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

13.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

14.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

15.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

16.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

17.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

18.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

20.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

21.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

22.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

23.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

24.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

25.

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

26.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

28.

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

Bible

29.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

30.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

31.

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

32.

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

Mailer, Norman

33.

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)

34.

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

35.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

36.

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

37.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

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.

39.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

41.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

42.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

43.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

44.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

45.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

49.

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

Joyce, James

50.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume