Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Art

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Piet Mondrian

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

10.

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

Wilson, Robert

11.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

12.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

13.

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

14.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

15.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

16.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

17.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

18.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

19.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

20.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

21.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

22.

Love can heal a broken heart.

23.

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

Ben Shahn

24.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

25.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

26.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

27.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

29.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

30.

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

31.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

32.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

33.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

34.

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

M. C. Richards

35.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

36.

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

Camus, Albert

37.

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

38.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

39.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

42.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

43.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

48.

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