Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

- Cicero

Best Quotes about Art

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

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

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

10.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

11.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

12.

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

13.

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

Ciardi, John

14.

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

15.

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

16.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

17.

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

18.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

19.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

20.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

21.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

22.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

23.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

25.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

26.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

27.

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

28.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Kennedy, John F.

30.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

31.

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

Shakespeare, William

32.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

33.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

34.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

35.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

37.

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

38.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

39.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

40.

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

Capp, Al

41.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

42.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

43.

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

Bellow, Saul

44.

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

45.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

46.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

47.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

49.

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

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell