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

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

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

Klee, Paul

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

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

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

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

10.

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

Cather, Willa

11.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

12.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

13.

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

Burroughs, William S.

14.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

15.

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

16.

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

Cioran, E. M.

17.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

22.

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

Camus, Albert

23.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

24.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

25.

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

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Moses, Grandma

28.

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

Ruskin, John

29.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

30.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

31.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

32.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

33.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

34.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

35.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

36.

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

37.

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

38.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

39.

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

Eliot, T. S.

40.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

41.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

42.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

43.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

44.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

45.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

46.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

47.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

48.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

49.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

50.

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