Motivational Quotes

Art

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

- John Singer Sargent

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

10.

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

Connolly, Cyril

11.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

12.

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

Thurber, James

13.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

14.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

15.

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

Bible

16.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

17.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

18.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

19.

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

Camus, Albert

20.

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

21.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

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

Ovid

23.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

24.

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

25.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

26.

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

Proverb, Chinese

27.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

28.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

29.

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

Joyce, James

30.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

31.

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

Ciardi, John

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Eugene Delacroix

35.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

37.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

38.

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

39.

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

Klee, Paul

40.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

41.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

42.

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

Gutzkow

43.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

44.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

45.

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

46.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

47.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

48.

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

49.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

50.

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

Kael, Pauline