Motivational Quotes

Art

What I dream of is an art of balance.

- Henri Matisse

Best Quotes about Art

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

Andre Gide

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

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

Warhol, Andy

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

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

10.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

11.

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

Connolly, Cyril

12.

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

13.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

14.

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

15.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

16.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

17.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

18.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

19.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

20.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

21.

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

22.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

23.

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

24.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

25.

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

Keller, Helen

26.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

27.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

28.

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

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

33.

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

34.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

35.

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

36.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

39.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

40.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

41.

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

42.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

43.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

44.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

45.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

46.

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

Cather, Willa

47.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

48.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

49.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

50.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos