Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Kooning, Willem De

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

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

Ben Shahn

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

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

Sand, George

10.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

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.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

13.

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

Anderson, Judith

14.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

15.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

17.

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

18.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

19.

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

Kennedy, John F.

20.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

21.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

22.

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

23.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

24.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

25.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

30.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

31.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

32.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

33.

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

34.

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

35.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

36.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

37.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

41.

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

Ward Jenkins

42.

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

43.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

44.

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

Kael, Pauline

45.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

46.

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

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.

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

49.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

50.

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