Motivational Quotes

Art

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)

Best Quotes about Art

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

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

George Tooker

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

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

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

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

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

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

Henry Ward Beecher

10.

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

Yu Cao

11.

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

Andre Gide

12.

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

13.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

14.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

15.

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

16.

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

17.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

18.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

19.

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

Brown, John Mason

20.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

21.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Truman, Harry S

25.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

26.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

27.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

28.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

29.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

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

Warhol, Andy

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

34.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

35.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

39.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

40.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

41.

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

Paz, Octavio

42.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

43.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

44.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

45.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

46.

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

47.

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

48.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

50.

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

Kooning, Willem De