Motivational Quotes

Art

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

- Phillips, Wendell

Best Quotes about Art

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

10.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

11.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

12.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

13.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

14.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

15.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

16.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

17.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

18.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

19.

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

20.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

21.

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

Frye, Northrop

22.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

23.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

24.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

25.

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

26.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

27.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

28.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

29.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

30.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Woodberry, George E.

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.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

34.

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

Andre Gide

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

37.

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

Conrad, Joseph

38.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

39.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

40.

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.

41.

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

Jeff Melvoin

42.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

43.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

44.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

45.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

46.

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

47.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

48.

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

Pablo Picasso

49.

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

Driscoll, Louise

50.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin