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

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Anderson, Bill

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

Proverb

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

10.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

11.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

12.

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

13.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

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.

15.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

17.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

18.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

19.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

21.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

22.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

23.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

26.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

27.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

28.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

29.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

30.

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

Simonides

31.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

32.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

33.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

34.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

35.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

36.

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

37.

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

Kooning, Willem De

38.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

39.

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

Duke Ellington

40.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

41.

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

42.

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

Proust, Marcel

43.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

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.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

46.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo