Motivational Quotes

Art

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Art

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

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

Motherwell, Robert

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

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

Eugene Delacroix

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

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

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

10.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

14.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

15.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

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

Kempis, Thomas

17.

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

18.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

19.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

20.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

21.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Eliot, T. S.

25.

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

26.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

28.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

29.

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

30.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

31.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Ambrose Bierce

33.

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

34.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

36.

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

37.

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

Bangs, Lester

38.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

39.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

40.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

41.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

42.

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

43.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

44.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

45.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

46.

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

47.