Motivational Quotes

Art

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

- Buckingham, Duke of

Best Quotes about Art

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

Bible

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

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

William Baziotes

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

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

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

10.

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

11.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

12.

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

Pablo Picasso

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

16.

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

17.

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

18.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

19.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

20.

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

Joyce, James

21.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

22.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

23.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

24.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

25.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

26.

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

27.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

28.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

29.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

30.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

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

32.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

33.

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

Ambrose Bierce

34.

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

Sand, George

35.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

36.

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

37.

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

Schumann, Robert

38.

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

39.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

40.

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

Connolly, Cyril

41.

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

Gill, Eric

42.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

43.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

44.

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

Duke Ellington

45.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

46.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

47.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

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

49.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

50.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad