Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Love can heal a broken heart.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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

Parker, Theodore

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

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

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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

Blackie, Professor

10.

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

11.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

12.

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

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

15.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

16.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

17.

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

18.

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

Sand, George

19.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

20.

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

Moses, Grandma

21.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

22.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

23.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

24.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

25.

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

26.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

27.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

28.

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

Pascal, Blaise

29.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

31.

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

Truman, Harry S

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Cassady, Neal

35.

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

Shakespeare, William

36.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

37.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

38.

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

39.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

40.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

41.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

42.

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

Burroughs, William S.

43.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

44.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

45.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

46.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

47.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

48.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

49.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

50.

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

Cioran, E. M.