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

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

Yu Cao

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

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

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

10.

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

Ambrose Bierce

11.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

12.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

14.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

15.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

16.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

17.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

18.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

19.

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

20.

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

Moses, Grandma

21.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

22.

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

Eugene Delacroix

23.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

24.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

25.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

26.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

27.

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

Zola, Emile

28.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

29.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

30.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

31.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

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

Ruckett

33.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

34.

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

35.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

36.

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

37.

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

38.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

39.

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

Proverb, Chinese

40.

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

41.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Ward Jenkins

43.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

44.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

45.

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