Motivational Quotes

Art

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

- Miguel de Cervantes

Best Quotes about Art

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

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

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

Truman, Harry S

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

Jacob, Max

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Driscoll, Louise

13.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

14.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

15.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

16.

Love can heal a broken heart.

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

19.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

20.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

21.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

22.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

23.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

24.

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.

25.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

26.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

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

28.

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

Proust, Marcel

29.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

30.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

33.

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

Ovid

34.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

35.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

36.

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

37.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

38.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Updike, John

45.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

46.

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

47.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

48.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

49.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

50.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von