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

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

10.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

11.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

12.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

14.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

18.

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

Al Capp

19.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

20.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

21.

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

Truman, Harry S

22.

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

23.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

24.

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.

25.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

Burroughs, William S.

27.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

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

Ovid

29.

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

30.

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

Driscoll, Louise

31.

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

32.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

34.

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

Klee, Paul

35.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

36.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

38.

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

39.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

40.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

41.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

42.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

43.

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

44.

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

Gill, Eric

45.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

46.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Kooning, Willem De