Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Chopra, Deepak

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

Kooning, Willem De

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

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

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

Thurber, James

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.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

10.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

11.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

12.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

17.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

18.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

19.

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

Isak Dineson

20.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

21.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

22.

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

Frye, Northrop

23.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

24.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

25.

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

26.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

27.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

28.

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

Eliot, T. S.

29.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

30.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

31.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

35.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

36.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

37.

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

38.

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

Murdoch, Iris

39.

Love can heal a broken heart.

40.

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

41.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

42.

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

43.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

44.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

47.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.