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

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Sand, George

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

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

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

10.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

11.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

12.

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

13.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

14.

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

Cather, Willa

15.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

16.

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

Picasso, Pablo

17.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

18.

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

19.

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

20.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

21.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

22.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

23.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

24.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

25.

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

26.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

Motherwell, Robert

28.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

29.

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

30.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

31.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

32.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

33.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

34.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

35.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

36.

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

Jeff Melvoin

37.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

38.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

39.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

40.

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

41.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

43.

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

44.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

45.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

46.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

47.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

48.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

49.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

50.

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