Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Miguel de Cervantes

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

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

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

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

Pablo Picasso

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

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

11.

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

Jeff Melvoin

12.

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

Updike, John

13.

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

14.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

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

16.

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

Berle, Adolf

17.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

18.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

19.

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

20.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

21.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

22.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

23.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

24.

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

25.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

26.

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

Simonides

27.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

28.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

29.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

30.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

31.

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

Gide, Andre

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.

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.

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

Ciardi, John

35.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

36.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

37.

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

Conrad, Joseph

38.

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

39.

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

40.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

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

43.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

44.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

45.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

46.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

47.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

48.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

50.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert