Motivational Quotes

Art

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

- Capp, Al

Best Quotes about Art

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

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

Love can heal a broken heart.

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

Weil, Simone

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

Joyce, James

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

10.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

11.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

12.

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

13.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

14.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Kempis, Thomas

18.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

19.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

20.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

21.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

22.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

23.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

24.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

25.

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

Kooning, Willem De

26.

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

27.

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

Zola, Emile

28.

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

Eugene Delacroix

29.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Moses, Grandma

33.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

34.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

35.

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

36.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

37.

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

38.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

45.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

46.

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

47.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

50.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul