Motivational Quotes

Art

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

- Picabia, Francis

Best Quotes about Art

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Waugh, Evelyn

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

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

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

10.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

11.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

12.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

13.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

18.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

19.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

20.

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

Klee, Paul

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

24.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

25.

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

Piero Milani

26.

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

27.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

28.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

29.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

30.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

31.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

35.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

38.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

39.

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

40.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

41.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

43.

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

Jackson Pollock

44.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

45.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

46.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

47.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

48.

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

George Tooker

49.

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

50.

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

Parker, Dorothy