Motivational Quotes

Art

I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin

Best Quotes about Art

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

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

Motherwell, Robert

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

Jeff Melvoin

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

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

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

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

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

10.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

11.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

12.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

13.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

14.

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

Pascal, Blaise

15.

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

Brown, John Mason

16.

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

17.

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

Eugene Delacroix

18.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

19.

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

Ciardi, John

20.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

21.

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

22.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

23.

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

Driscoll, Louise

24.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

25.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

26.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

28.

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

Peri, Gabriel

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

31.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

36.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

37.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

38.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

39.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

40.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

41.

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

42.

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

Capp, Al

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

46.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

47.

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

48.

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

Pablo Picasso

49.

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

50.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish