Motivational Quotes

Art

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

- John Singer Sargent

Best Quotes about Art

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

Cioran, E. M.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

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

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)

10.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

11.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

15.

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

16.

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

Andre Gide

17.

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

18.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

19.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

20.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

21.

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

Midler, Bette

22.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

23.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

24.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

25.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

26.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

30.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

31.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

32.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

33.

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

Kael, Pauline

34.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

35.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

37.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

38.

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

39.

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

Ciardi, John

40.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

41.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

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

43.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

44.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

45.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

47.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Camus, Albert