Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

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

Edmond de Goncourt

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

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

Morris, William

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

Burroughs, William S.

10.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

11.

Camus, Albert

12.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

13.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

14.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

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

16.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

17.

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.

18.

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

Keller, Helen

19.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

20.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

21.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

22.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

23.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

24.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

25.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

26.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27.

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

Piet Mondrian

28.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

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

30.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

31.

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

Ward Jenkins

32.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

33.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

34.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

35.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

36.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

37.

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

38.

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

Jeff Melvoin

39.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

40.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

41.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

42.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

43.

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

44.

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

Truman, Harry S

45.

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

46.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

47.

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

48.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

49.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

50.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini