Motivational Quotes

Art

I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

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

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

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

Woodberry, George E.

10.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

11.

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

12.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

13.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

17.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

18.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

19.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

20.

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

21.

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

Jeff Melvoin

22.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

23.

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

Ovid

24.

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

25.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

26.

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

27.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

28.

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

29.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

30.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

31.

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

William Baziotes

32.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

33.

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

Ruckett

34.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

35.

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

Ciardi, John

36.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

37.

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

38.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

39.

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

40.

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

Edith Wharton

41.

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

42.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

43.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

44.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

45.

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)

46.

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

Weil, Simone

47.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

48.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

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

Kael, Pauline

50.

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