Motivational Quotes

Art

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

- Jackson Pollock

Best Quotes about Art

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

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

Burroughs, William S.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Pablo Picasso

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

10.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

12.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

13.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

14.

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

15.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

16.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

17.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

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

19.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

21.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

22.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

23.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

24.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

25.

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

Mann, Horace

26.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

28.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

31.

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

32.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

33.

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

Gutzkow

34.

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

35.

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

Keller, Helen

36.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

37.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

38.

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

39.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

40.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

41.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

42.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

43.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

44.

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

45.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

46.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

47.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

49.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon