Motivational Quotes

Art

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

- Johnson, Ben

Best Quotes about Art

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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)

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

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

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

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

10.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

13.

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

Ruckett

14.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

15.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

16.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

17.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

18.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

19.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

21.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

22.

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

Zola, Emile

23.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

24.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

30.

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

Thurber, James

31.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

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

33.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

34.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

35.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

36.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

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

Andre Gide

38.

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

39.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

40.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

41.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

42.

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

Varese, Edward

43.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

44.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

45.

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

Melville, Herman

46.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

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.

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

49.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

50.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes