Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

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

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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

10.

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

Cather, Willa

11.

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

Moses, Grandma

12.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

13.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

14.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

15.

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

Ambrose Bierce

16.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

17.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

18.

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

Peri, Gabriel

19.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

20.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

21.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

24.

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

Motherwell, Robert

25.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

26.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

27.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

28.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

29.

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

Proust, Marcel

30.

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

George Tooker

31.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

32.

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

Edith Wharton

33.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

34.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

35.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

36.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

37.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

38.

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

39.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

40.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

41.

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

Parker, Dorothy

42.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

43.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

44.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

45.

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

John F. Kennedy

46.

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

47.

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

48.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

49.

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

50.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani