Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

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

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

Andre Gide

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

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

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

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

Zola, Emile

10.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

14.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

15.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

17.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

18.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

19.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

20.

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

21.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

22.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

23.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

24.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

25.

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

Proust, Marcel

26.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

28.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Jeff Melvoin

30.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

31.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

32.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

33.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

34.

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

35.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

36.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

38.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

39.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

40.

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

41.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

42.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

43.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

45.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

46.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

47.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

48.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

49.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

50.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.