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

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

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

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

Parker, Theodore

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

10.

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

Ovid

11.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

12.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

13.

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

14.

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

Varese, Edward

15.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

16.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

17.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

18.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

19.

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

20.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

21.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

22.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

23.

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

Proust, Marcel

24.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

25.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

26.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

27.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

31.

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

Isak Dineson

32.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

33.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

34.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

35.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

39.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

40.

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

Cassady, Neal

41.

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

42.

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

Peri, Gabriel

43.

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

Ben Shahn

44.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

45.

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

46.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

47.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

48.

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

49.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

50.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn