Motivational Quotes

Art

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

- Edith Wharton

Best Quotes about Art

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

Andre Gide

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

10.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

11.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

12.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

13.

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

Wordsworth, William

14.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

15.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

16.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

17.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

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

19.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

20.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

21.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

23.

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

24.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

30.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

34.

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

35.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

36.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

37.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

38.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

39.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

40.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

41.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

45.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

46.

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

47.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

48.

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

49.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

50.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von