Motivational Quotes

Art

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

- Pablo Picasso

Best Quotes about Art

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

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

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

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

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

Joyce, James

10.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

11.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

12.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

13.

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

Camus, Albert

14.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

15.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

16.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

17.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

18.

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

Edith Wharton

19.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

20.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

21.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

22.

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

Peri, Gabriel

23.

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

24.

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

Truman, Harry S

25.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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

Picasso, Pablo

27.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

32.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

33.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

35.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

36.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

37.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

38.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

39.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

40.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

41.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

42.

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

Piero Milani

43.

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

Ben Shahn

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

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

Cassady, Neal

47.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

48.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

49.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

50.

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

Parker, Dorothy