Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

- Haydon, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Art

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

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

George Tooker

10.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

12.

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

13.

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

14.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

15.

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

Kooning, Willem De

16.

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

Thurber, James

17.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

18.

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

19.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

20.

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

21.

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

Churchill, Winston

22.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

23.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

24.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

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

Shakespeare, William

26.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

27.

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

Paz, Octavio

28.

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

29.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

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

31.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

32.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

33.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

36.

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

37.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

38.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

39.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

40.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

41.

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

42.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

45.

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

46.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

48.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

50.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst