Motivational Quotes

Art

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Art

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Camus, Albert

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

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

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

George Tooker

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

10.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

11.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

17.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

18.

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

Kempis, Thomas

19.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

20.

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

21.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

23.

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

24.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

26.

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.

27.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

28.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

29.

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

Morris, William

30.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

31.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

32.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

33.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

34.

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

Chopra, Deepak

35.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

36.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

38.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

43.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

44.

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

Riding, Laura

45.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

46.

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.

47.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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