Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Proverb, Chinese

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

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

Ambrose Bierce

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Cioran, E. M.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

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

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

14.

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

Yu Cao

15.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

16.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

17.

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

Churchill, Winston

18.

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

19.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

20.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

21.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

22.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

23.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

24.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

25.

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

Parker, Dorothy

26.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

29.

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

Berle, Adolf

30.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

31.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

32.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

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

Updike, John

36.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

37.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

38.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

39.

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

G. K. Chesterton

40.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

Eugene Delacroix

42.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

43.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

44.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

45.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

46.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

47.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

49.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

50.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell