Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Camus, Albert

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

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

Morris, William

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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

10.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

11.

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

12.

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

Peri, Gabriel

13.

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

Varese, Edward

14.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

15.

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

16.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

17.

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

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

Love can heal a broken heart.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

24.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

25.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

26.

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

Ovid

27.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

29.

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

30.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

31.

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

32.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

33.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

35.

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

36.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

37.

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

Ben Shahn

38.

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

39.

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

Kooning, Willem De

40.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

41.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

42.

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

Riding, Laura

43.

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

Burroughs, William S.

44.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

45.

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

Al Capp

46.

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.

47.

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

Anderson, Judith

48.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

49.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

50.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.