Motivational Quotes

Art

What we play is life.

- Louis Armstrong

Best Quotes about Art

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

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

M. C. Richards

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

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

Updike, John

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

10.

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

11.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

12.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

13.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

14.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

16.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

18.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

19.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

22.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

23.

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

24.

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

Ben Shahn

25.

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

G. K. Chesterton

26.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

27.

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

Al Capp

28.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

29.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

30.

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

31.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

35.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

37.

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

Kempis, Thomas

38.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

39.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

40.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

41.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

42.

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

John F. Kennedy

43.

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

44.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

45.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Andre Gide

49.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

50.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak