Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Art

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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

Miguel de Cervantes

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

Parker, Dorothy

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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

Riding, Laura

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

10.

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.

11.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

12.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

13.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

14.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

15.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

16.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

17.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

18.

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

19.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

20.

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

21.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

22.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

23.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

24.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

25.

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

26.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

27.

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

28.

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

George Tooker

29.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

30.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

31.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

32.

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

33.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

34.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

35.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

36.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

37.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

38.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

39.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

45.

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

46.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

47.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

48.

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

Piero Milani

49.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

50.

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

Bellow, Saul