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

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

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

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

10.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

11.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

12.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

13.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

14.

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

Riding, Laura

15.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

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

17.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

18.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

19.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

20.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

21.

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

G. K. Chesterton

22.

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

Weil, Simone

23.

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

Woodberry, George E.

24.

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

25.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

26.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

27.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

28.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

29.

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

Gill, Eric

30.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

31.

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

32.

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

33.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

34.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

35.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

37.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

39.

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

40.

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

Kooning, Willem De

41.

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

42.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

43.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

44.

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

45.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

46.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

50.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume