Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

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

Kooning, Willem De

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

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

Moses, Grandma

10.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

11.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

12.

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

Keller, Helen

13.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

14.

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

Ambrose Bierce

15.

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

G. K. Chesterton

16.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

17.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

18.

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.

19.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

20.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

21.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

22.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

23.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

24.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

25.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

26.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

27.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

28.

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

29.

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

Cather, Willa

30.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

31.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

33.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

34.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

35.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

36.

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

37.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

40.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

41.

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

Chopra, Deepak

42.

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

43.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

44.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

45.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

46.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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

Yu Cao