Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Isak Dineson

Best Quotes about Art

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

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

W. Somerset Maugham

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

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

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

10.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

11.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

12.

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

13.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

14.

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

Driscoll, Louise

15.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

20.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

21.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

25.

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

Yu Cao

26.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

27.

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

28.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

29.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

30.

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

Frye, Northrop

31.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

32.

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

33.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

34.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

35.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

36.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

37.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

38.

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

39.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

40.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

41.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

42.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

43.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

44.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

46.

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

47.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore