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

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

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

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

Bangs, Lester

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

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

Yu Cao

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

David Cronenberg

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

Castaneda, Carlos

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

10.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

11.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

12.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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

Ambrose Bierce

15.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

16.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

17.

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

Kooning, Willem De

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.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

20.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

21.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

22.

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

Morris, William

23.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

24.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

25.

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

Cather, Willa

26.

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

27.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

29.

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

30.

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

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.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

33.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

34.

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

35.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

36.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

37.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

38.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

39.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

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

Piet Mondrian

43.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

44.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

45.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

46.

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

47.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

48.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

49.

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

50.

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