Motivational Quotes

Art

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Art

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

John F. Kennedy

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

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

Ruckett

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

Henry Ward Beecher

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

Duke Ellington

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

Joyce, James

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

10.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

11.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

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

13.

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

Ambrose Bierce

14.

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

15.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

16.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

17.

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.

18.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

19.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Truman, Harry S

21.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

22.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

23.

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

24.

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

Frost, Robert

25.

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

Thurber, James

26.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

28.

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

Sand, George

29.

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

30.

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

Ciardi, John

31.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

32.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

33.

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

34.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

35.

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

36.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

37.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

38.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

39.

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

40.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

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.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

43.

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

William Baziotes

44.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

45.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

47.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

48.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair