Motivational Quotes

Art

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

- Chagall, Marc

Best Quotes about Art

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

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

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

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

Burroughs, William S.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

10.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

11.

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

Eliot, T. S.

12.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

13.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

14.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

15.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

16.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

23.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

24.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

25.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

26.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

27.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

28.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

30.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

34.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

36.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

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

39.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

40.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

41.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

42.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

44.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

45.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

46.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

47.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

48.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.