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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Proverb

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

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

Lowell, James Russell

10.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

11.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

12.

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

13.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

15.

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

Andre Gide

16.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

17.

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

Riding, Laura

18.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

19.

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

Ambrose Bierce

20.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

21.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

22.

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

23.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

24.

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

25.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

26.

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

Eugene Delacroix

27.

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

Bible

28.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

29.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

30.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

31.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

32.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

33.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

34.

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

35.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

36.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

37.

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

38.

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

Piet Mondrian

39.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

40.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

41.

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

42.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

45.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

46.

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

47.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

48.

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

Wilson, Robert

49.

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

Isak Dineson

50.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert