Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Yu Cao

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

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

Klee, Paul

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

11.

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

12.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

13.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

14.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

15.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

16.

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

Andre Gide

17.

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

Kooning, Willem De

18.

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

Keller, Helen

19.

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

20.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

21.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

24.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

27.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

28.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

29.

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

30.

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

Ambrose Bierce

31.

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

32.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

33.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

35.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

36.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

37.

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

Parker, Dorothy

38.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

39.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

40.

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

David Cronenberg

41.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

42.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

43.

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

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

45.

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

Wilson, Robert

46.

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

Walt Whitman

47.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

48.

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

Churchill, Winston

49.

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

50.

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