Motivational Quotes

Art

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

- Burroughs, William S.

Best Quotes about Art

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

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)

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

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

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

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

11.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

12.

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

13.

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

Midler, Bette

14.

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

15.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

16.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

17.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

18.

Love can heal a broken heart.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

23.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

24.

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

Pablo Picasso

25.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

26.

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

Anderson, Judith

27.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

30.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

31.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

32.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

33.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

34.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

35.

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

36.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

37.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

38.

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

Piet Mondrian

39.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

40.

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

41.

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

Mailer, Norman

42.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

43.

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

44.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

48.

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

49.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

50.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd