Motivational Quotes

Art

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

- Melville, Herman

Best Quotes about Art

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

10.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

11.

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)

12.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

Jackson Pollock

14.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

15.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

16.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

17.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

18.

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

19.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

20.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

21.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

22.

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

Sand, George

23.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

24.

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

Kooning, Willem De

25.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

26.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

27.

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

28.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

29.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

30.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

31.

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

32.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

33.

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

34.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

35.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

36.

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

37.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

38.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

39.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

40.

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

Parker, Dorothy

41.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

42.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

43.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

44.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

45.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

46.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

47.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

48.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

50.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette