Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Simonides

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

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

Shaw, George Bernard

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

10.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

11.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

12.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

13.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

G. K. Chesterton

17.

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

18.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

19.

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

20.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

21.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

22.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

23.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

24.

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

25.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

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

John F. Kennedy

28.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

30.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

31.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

32.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

33.

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

34.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

35.

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

Arp, Jean

36.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

37.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

38.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

39.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

44.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

45.

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

Capp, Al

46.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

47.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

48.

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

Ovid

49.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

50.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini