Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Jackson Pollock

Best Quotes about Art

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

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

Frye, Northrop

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

Ruckett

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

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.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

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

Eliot, T. S.

10.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

11.

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

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

14.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

15.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

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

17.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

18.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

19.

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

Woodberry, George E.

20.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

21.

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

Ciardi, John

22.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

23.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

24.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

25.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

26.

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

Varese, Edward

27.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

29.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

30.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

31.

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

32.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

33.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

34.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

35.

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

Motherwell, Robert

36.

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

37.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

38.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

42.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

43.

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

Kooning, Willem De

44.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

45.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

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

Klee, Paul

47.

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

48.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

49.

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

50.

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