Motivational Quotes

Art

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

- Lowell, James Russell

Best Quotes about Art

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

Wilson, Robert

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Jeff Melvoin

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

M. C. Richards

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

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

Edmond de Goncourt

10.

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)

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

14.

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

Bible

15.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

16.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

17.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

18.

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

19.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

20.

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

21.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

23.

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

24.

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

25.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

26.

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

27.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

28.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

29.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

30.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

31.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

32.

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

G. K. Chesterton

33.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

36.

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

Motherwell, Robert

37.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

38.

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

39.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

44.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

45.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

48.

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

Klee, Paul

49.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

50.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell