Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

- Cicero

Best Quotes about Art

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

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.

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

Holyfield, Evander

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

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

Thurber, James

10.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

14.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

15.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

16.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

17.

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

18.

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

Sand, George

19.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

20.

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

21.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

22.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

23.

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

24.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

25.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

26.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

27.

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

28.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

31.

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

Shakespeare, William

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Piet Mondrian

36.

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

37.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

38.

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

Cather, Willa

39.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

40.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

41.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

42.

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

Jeff Melvoin

43.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

44.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

46.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

47.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

48.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

49.

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

50.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul