Motivational Quotes

Art

What I dream of is an art of balance.

- Henri Matisse

Best Quotes about Art

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

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

Brancusi, Constantin

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

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

Warhol, Andy

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Woodberry, George E.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

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

John F. Kennedy

10.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

11.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

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.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Cather, Willa

16.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

17.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

18.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

19.

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

20.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

21.

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

Isak Dineson

22.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

23.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

24.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

25.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

26.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

27.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

32.

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

George Tooker

33.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

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

36.

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

Frye, Northrop

37.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

41.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

44.

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

45.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

46.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

47.

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.

48.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

49.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

50.

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