Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

- Henry Ward Beecher

Best Quotes about 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

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

Keller, Helen

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

10.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

11.

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

12.

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

Yu Cao

13.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

14.

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

Camus, Albert

15.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

16.

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

17.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

18.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

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

20.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

21.

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

Thurber, James

22.

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

23.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

24.

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

Piet Mondrian

25.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

26.

Love can heal a broken heart.

27.

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

Kooning, Willem De

28.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

30.

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

31.

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

Ruskin, John

32.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

33.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

34.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

35.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

36.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

37.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

38.

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

39.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

40.

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

41.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

42.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

43.

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

44.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

45.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

46.

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.

47.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

48.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

49.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

50.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.