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

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

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

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

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

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

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

Gill, Eric

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

Woodberry, George E.

10.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

11.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

13.

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

14.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

15.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

16.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

17.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

18.

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

Moses, Grandma

19.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

20.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

24.

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

25.

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

Chopra, Deepak

26.

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

27.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

28.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

29.

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

30.

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

Isak Dineson

31.

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

32.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

35.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

36.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

37.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

38.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

39.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

40.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

41.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

43.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

44.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

45.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

46.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

47.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

48.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

49.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

50.

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.