Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Elizabeth Bowen

Best Quotes about Art

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Eliot, T. S.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

11.

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

Picasso, Pablo

12.

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

13.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

14.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

15.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Ruckett

17.

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

18.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

19.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

20.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

21.

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

22.

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

23.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

24.

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

25.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

26.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

27.

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

Ciardi, John

28.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

29.

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

30.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

32.

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

Mailer, Norman

33.

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.

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

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

36.

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

Camus, Albert

37.

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

38.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

42.

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

43.

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

44.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

45.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

48.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

49.

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

Novalis

50.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De