Motivational Quotes

Art

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

- Cather, Willa

Best Quotes about Art

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

Midler, Bette

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

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

John F. Kennedy

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

Picasso, Pablo

10.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

14.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

18.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

23.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

26.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

30.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

31.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

32.

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

Ambrose Bierce

33.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

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

Burroughs, William S.

35.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

36.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

37.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Edith Wharton

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.

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

Ward Jenkins

44.

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

45.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

46.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.