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

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

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

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

10.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

11.

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

12.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

13.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

14.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

15.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

16.

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

Motherwell, Robert

17.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

18.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

19.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

20.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

21.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

22.

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.

23.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

24.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

25.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

26.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

27.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

28.

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

29.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

30.

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

Truman, Harry S

31.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

32.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

34.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

35.

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

Sand, George

36.

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

37.

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

38.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

39.

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

40.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

41.

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

42.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

44.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

45.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

46.

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

47.

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

Anderson, Bill

48.

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

Capp, Al

49.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

50.

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