Motivational Quotes

Art

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

- Pablo Picasso

Best Quotes about Art

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

Proverb

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Gide, Andre

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

Al Capp

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

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

13.

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

14.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

15.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

16.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

17.

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

18.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

19.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

20.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

21.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

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

Proust, Marcel

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

27.

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

Cioran, E. M.

28.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

29.

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

30.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

31.

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

Anderson, Bill

32.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

33.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

34.

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

35.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

36.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

37.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

38.

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

39.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

40.

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

G. K. Chesterton

41.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

42.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Ben Shahn

48.

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

Varese, Edward

49.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

50.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.