Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ciardi, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

Tynan, Kenneth

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Cather, Willa

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

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

10.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

11.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

12.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

14.

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

Brown, John Mason

15.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

16.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

17.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

18.

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

Yu Cao

19.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Wilson, Robert

24.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

26.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

27.

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

Weil, Simone

28.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

29.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

31.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

35.

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

Bible

36.

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

Melville, Herman

37.

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

38.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

39.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

40.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

41.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

43.

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

44.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

45.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

46.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

47.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

48.

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

Woodberry, George E.

49.

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

50.

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

Al Capp