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

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

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

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

Wilson, Robert

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

Frost, Robert

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.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

10.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

11.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

12.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

13.

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

14.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

15.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

16.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

17.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

18.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

19.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

20.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

21.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

22.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

23.

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

24.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

26.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

27.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

28.

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

29.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

33.

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

G. K. Chesterton

34.

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

Eugene Delacroix

35.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

36.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

37.

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

38.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

39.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

40.

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

Peri, Gabriel

41.

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

Novalis

42.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

43.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Jeff Melvoin

48.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

49.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

50.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister