Motivational Quotes

Art

I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin

Best Quotes about Art

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Joyce, James

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

Ruskin, John

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

10.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

11.

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

12.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

17.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

18.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

19.

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

Walt Whitman

20.

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

21.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

22.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

23.

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

24.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

26.

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

Woodberry, George E.

27.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

28.

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

29.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

30.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

31.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

33.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

34.

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

35.

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

Eugene Delacroix

36.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

37.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

39.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

40.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

41.

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

Parker, Dorothy

42.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

43.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

44.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

45.

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

46.

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

Ruckett

47.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

48.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

49.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

50.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole