Motivational Quotes

Art

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

- Jeff Melvoin

Best Quotes about Art

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Parker, Theodore

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

11.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

12.

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

13.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

17.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

18.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

19.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

20.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

22.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

23.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

24.

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

Shakespeare, William

25.

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.

26.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

27.

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

Truman, Harry S

28.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

29.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

30.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

31.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

34.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

35.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

36.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

37.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

39.

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

40.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

41.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

42.

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

43.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

47.

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

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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