Motivational Quotes

Art

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

- Frida Kahlo

Best Quotes about Art

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

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

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

Edith Wharton

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

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

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)

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

10.

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

Isak Dineson

11.

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

12.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

13.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

14.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

15.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

16.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

17.

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

18.

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

Berle, Adolf

19.

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

Gutzkow

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

22.

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

23.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

25.

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.

26.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

27.

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.

28.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

29.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

30.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

31.

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

32.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

36.

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

37.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

38.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

39.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

40.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

41.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

42.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

43.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

44.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

45.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

46.

Love can heal a broken heart.

47.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

49.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

50.

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