Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Love can heal a broken heart.

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

Truman, Harry S

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Capp, Al

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

12.

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

Chopra, Deepak

13.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

16.

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

Riding, Laura

17.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

18.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

19.

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

20.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

21.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

22.

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

23.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

24.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

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

Ciardi, John

26.

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

Einstein, Albert

27.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

28.

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

Jacob, Max

29.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

30.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

31.

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

32.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

33.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

34.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

35.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

36.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

37.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

38.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

39.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

42.

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

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.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

45.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

46.

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

Frye, Northrop

47.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

48.

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

49.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

50.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William