Motivational Quotes

Art

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Art

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

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

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

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

10.

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

11.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

16.

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

17.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

18.

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

Kennedy, John F.

19.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

20.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

21.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

22.

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

Bible

23.

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

Morris, William

24.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

25.

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.

26.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

27.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

29.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

30.

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

31.

Love can heal a broken heart.

32.

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

33.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

34.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

35.

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

36.

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

Driscoll, Louise

37.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

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

39.

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

Jackson Pollock

40.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

41.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

42.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

43.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

44.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

45.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

46.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

47.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

48.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

49.

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

50.

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

David Cronenberg