Motivational Quotes

Art

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

- Edmond de Goncourt

Best Quotes about Art

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Anderson, Lindsay

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

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

Piet Mondrian

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

10.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

11.

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

Ciardi, John

12.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

13.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

14.

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

15.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

16.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

17.

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

Ward Jenkins

18.

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

Proverb

19.

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

20.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

21.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

22.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

23.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

24.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

25.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

26.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

27.

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

Eugene Delacroix

28.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

30.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

31.

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.

32.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

33.

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

34.

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

Camus, Albert

35.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

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

Wilson, Robert

37.

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

Mann, Horace

38.

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

39.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

40.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

41.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

42.

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

Kennedy, John F.

43.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

44.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

45.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

46.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

47.

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

48.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

49.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

50.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo