Motivational Quotes

Art

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

- Ginsberg, Allen

Best Quotes about Art

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

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

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

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

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

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

George Tooker

10.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

11.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

12.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

13.

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

14.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

15.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

16.

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

Keller, Helen

17.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

19.

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

Proust, Marcel

20.

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

21.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

23.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

24.

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

25.

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

Edith Wharton

26.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

27.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

28.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

30.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

31.

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

32.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

33.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

34.

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

35.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

36.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

37.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

38.

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

39.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

40.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

41.

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

42.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

43.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

44.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

45.

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

46.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

48.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.