Motivational Quotes

Art

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

- Eugene Delacroix

Best Quotes about Art

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

Novalis

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

Kempis, Thomas

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

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

10.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

11.

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

12.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

15.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

16.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

17.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

19.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

20.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

21.

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

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

26.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

27.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

28.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

29.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

30.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

31.

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

32.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

34.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

37.

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

Isak Dineson

38.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

39.

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

40.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

41.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

42.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

43.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

46.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Picasso, Pablo

48.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

49.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

50.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo