Motivational Quotes

Art

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

- George Tooker

Best Quotes about Art

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

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

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.

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

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

10.

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

11.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

13.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

14.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

15.

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

16.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

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

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

20.

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

Pascal, Blaise

21.

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

Sand, George

22.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

23.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

24.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

25.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

26.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

27.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

28.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

29.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

30.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

31.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

32.

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

33.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

34.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

35.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

36.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

37.

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

Burroughs, William S.

38.

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

Ovid

39.

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

Einstein, Albert

40.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

41.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

42.

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

Anderson, Judith

43.

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

44.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

45.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

46.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

47.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

48.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

49.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

50.

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