Motivational Quotes

Art

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Art

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

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

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

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

William Baziotes

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

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

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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

10.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

11.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

12.

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

Kooning, Willem De

13.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

14.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

15.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

16.

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

Andre Gide

17.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

18.

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

19.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

20.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

21.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

22.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

23.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

24.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

25.

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

26.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

27.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

28.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

30.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

34.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

37.

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

Ciardi, John

38.

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

39.

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

Jeff Melvoin

40.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

41.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

42.

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

Camus, Albert

43.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

44.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

45.

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

Melville, Herman

46.

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

47.

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

48.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

49.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

50.

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