Motivational Quotes

Art

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Art

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

William Baziotes

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

Wilson, Robert

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

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

Bible

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

Tynan, Kenneth

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

10.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

11.

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

John F. Kennedy

12.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

16.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

17.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

18.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

19.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

20.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

21.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

22.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

23.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

24.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

25.

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

26.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

27.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

28.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

29.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

32.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

33.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

34.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

35.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

36.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

37.

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

38.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

39.

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

Kennedy, John F.

40.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

41.

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

Picasso, Pablo

42.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

43.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

44.

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

Edith Wharton

45.

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

46.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

47.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

48.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

49.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

50.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques