Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

13.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

14.

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

Moses, Grandma

15.

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

16.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

17.

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

18.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

19.

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

20.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

21.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

22.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

23.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

24.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

25.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

26.

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

Capp, Al

27.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

28.

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

29.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

30.

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

31.

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

Weil, Simone

32.

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.

33.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

34.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

35.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

36.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

37.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

38.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

39.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

40.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

41.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

43.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

44.

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

Riding, Laura

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

48.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

49.

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

Eliot, T. S.

50.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider