Motivational Quotes

Art

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

- Federico Fellini

Best Quotes about Art

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Mann, Horace

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

10.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

11.

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

12.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

13.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

14.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

15.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

16.

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

Simonides

17.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

18.

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

Piet Mondrian

19.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

21.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

22.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

23.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

24.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

25.

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

Jeff Melvoin

26.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

27.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

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

Bangs, Lester

29.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

30.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Driscoll, Louise

32.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

33.

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

34.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

35.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

36.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

37.

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

Ovid

38.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

39.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

40.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

41.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

42.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

43.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

46.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

47.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

48.

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

49.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

50.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister