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

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

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

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

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

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

11.

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

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

14.

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

15.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

17.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

18.

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

Moses, Grandma

19.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

20.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

21.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

22.

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

Burroughs, William S.

23.

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

Pablo Picasso

24.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

26.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

27.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

28.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

29.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

30.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

31.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

32.

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

33.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

34.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Pascal, Blaise

38.

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

39.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

40.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

41.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

42.

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

43.

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

John F. Kennedy

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Eliot, T. S.

47.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

48.

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

Berle, Adolf

49.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson