Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kempis, Thomas

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

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

M. C. Richards

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

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

Eliot, T. S.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

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

10.

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

11.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

13.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

14.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

15.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

16.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

23.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

24.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

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

26.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

27.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

28.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

29.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

30.

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

31.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

32.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

33.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

34.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

Jacob, Max

36.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

37.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

38.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

39.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

40.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

41.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

42.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

43.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

44.

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

45.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

50.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste