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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

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

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

10.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

11.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

19.

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

20.

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

Piet Mondrian

21.

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.

22.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

23.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

24.

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

25.

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

Midler, Bette

26.

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

27.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

28.

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

Kooning, Willem De

29.

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

Isak Dineson

30.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

31.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

32.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

33.

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

34.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

35.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

36.

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

Ambrose Bierce

37.

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

38.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

39.

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

Anderson, Bill

40.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

41.

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

42.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

43.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

44.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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.

46.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

48.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

49.

Art is the objectification of feeling.