Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

- Cicero

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

Shakespeare, William

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

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

10.

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

Piet Mondrian

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

14.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

16.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

17.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

18.

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

19.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

20.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

Jovovich, Milla

22.

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

23.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

24.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

25.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

26.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

27.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

28.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

29.

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

Riding, Laura

30.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

31.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

32.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

33.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

34.

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

Brown, John Mason

35.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

36.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

37.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

38.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

39.

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.

40.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

41.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

42.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

44.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

45.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

46.

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

Thurber, James

47.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

48.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

49.

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

Proverb, Chinese

50.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord