Motivational Quotes

Art

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

- Kempis, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Wilson, Robert

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

Jacob, Max

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

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

Bible

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

10.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

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

13.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

14.

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

15.

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

Ruckett

16.

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

Ben Shahn

17.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

18.

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

Shakespeare, William

19.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

20.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

21.

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

22.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

23.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

24.

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.

25.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

26.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

27.

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

28.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

29.

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.

30.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

31.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

33.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

34.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

35.

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

Anderson, Bill

36.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

37.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

38.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

39.

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.

40.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

41.

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

42.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

43.

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

Sand, George

44.

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

Kennedy, John F.

45.

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

46.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

48.

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

49.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von