Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

- Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

Best Quotes about Art

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

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

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

10.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

13.

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

14.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

15.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

16.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

18.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

19.

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

Riding, Laura

20.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

21.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

22.

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

Parker, Theodore

23.

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

Lowell, James Russell

24.

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

25.

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

26.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

27.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

28.

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

29.

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

Eugene Delacroix

30.

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

31.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

32.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

33.

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

G. K. Chesterton

34.

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

Cather, Willa

35.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

36.

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

37.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

38.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

39.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

40.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

42.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

43.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

44.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

45.

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

46.

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

Holyfield, Evander

47.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

48.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

49.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

50.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard