Motivational Quotes

Art

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Thurber, James

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

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

Buckingham, Duke of

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

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

Woodberry, George E.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Moses, Grandma

10.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

11.

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

12.

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

Churchill, Winston

13.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

14.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

16.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

17.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

18.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

20.

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

Peri, Gabriel

21.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

24.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

25.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

26.

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

27.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

30.

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

31.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

32.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

33.

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

Wilson, Robert

34.

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

Ruckett

35.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

36.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

37.

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

Picasso, Pablo

38.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

41.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

42.

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

43.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

44.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.