Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

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

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

10.

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

John F. Kennedy

11.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

12.

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

Ciardi, John

13.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

14.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

15.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

16.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

17.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

18.

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

Duke Ellington

19.

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

Jeff Melvoin

20.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

21.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

22.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

23.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

24.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

25.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

26.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

27.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

28.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

29.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

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

Updike, John

31.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Connolly, Cyril

35.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

36.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

37.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

38.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

39.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

40.

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

Schumann, Robert

41.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

42.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

43.

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

Kooning, Willem De

44.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

45.

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

46.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

48.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

49.

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

50.

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