Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Klee, Paul

Best Quotes about Art

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

Berle, Adolf

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

Miguel de Cervantes

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

10.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

13.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

17.

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

18.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

19.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

20.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

21.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

22.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Camus, Albert

25.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

26.

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

Motherwell, Robert

27.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

28.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

29.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

30.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

31.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

32.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

33.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

34.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

35.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

36.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

37.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

38.

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

39.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

40.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

41.

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

42.

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

Bible

43.

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

44.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

45.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

46.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

47.

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

48.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

49.

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

M. C. Richards

50.

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