Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

- Ellis, Havelock

Best Quotes about Art

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

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

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Warhol, Andy

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

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

Chopra, Deepak

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

Mailer, Norman

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

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

10.

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

11.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

12.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

13.

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

14.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

15.

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

Holyfield, Evander

16.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

17.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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

Kooning, Willem De

20.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

21.

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

22.

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

23.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

24.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

25.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

26.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

27.

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

Isak Dineson

28.

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

29.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

30.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

31.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Ruckett

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

35.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

36.

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

Capp, Al

37.

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

38.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

43.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

44.

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

45.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

47.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas