Motivational Quotes

Art

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

- Kempis, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

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)

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

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

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

10.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

14.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

15.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

16.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

17.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

18.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

19.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

20.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

21.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

22.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

23.

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

Joyce, James

24.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

25.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

26.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

27.

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

28.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

29.

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

30.

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

Gide, Andre

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

35.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

36.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

37.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

38.

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

Holyfield, Evander

39.

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

40.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

41.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

43.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

44.

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

45.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

46.

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

George Tooker

47.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

48.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

49.

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

Eliot, T. S.

50.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso