Motivational Quotes

Art

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Art

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Kennedy, John F.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

10.

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

G. K. Chesterton

11.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

12.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

Mailer, Norman

15.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

16.

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

17.

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

George Tooker

18.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

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

Ambrose Bierce

20.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

21.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

22.

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

23.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

24.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

25.

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

Edith Wharton

26.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

27.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

28.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

29.

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

Schumann, Robert

30.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

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

Frye, Northrop

32.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

33.

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

34.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

35.

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

Yu Cao

36.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

37.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

38.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

40.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

41.

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

42.

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

43.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

46.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

48.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

49.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

50.

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