Motivational Quotes

Art

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Art

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Jovovich, Milla

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

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

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

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 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

11.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

12.

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

13.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

14.

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

15.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

16.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

17.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

18.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

19.

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

Holyfield, Evander

20.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

21.

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

22.

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

Brown, John Mason

23.

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

G. K. Chesterton

24.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

25.

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

26.

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

Ciardi, John

27.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

28.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

29.

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

30.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

31.

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

Wilson, Robert

32.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

33.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

34.

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.

35.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

36.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

37.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

38.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

39.

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

Kooning, Willem De

40.

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

41.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

42.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

44.

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