Motivational Quotes

Art

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

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

Piet Mondrian

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

Berle, Adolf

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

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

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

10.

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

Eugene Delacroix

11.

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

12.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

13.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

14.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

15.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

16.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

George Tooker

21.

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

Parker, Dorothy

22.

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

Jackson Pollock

23.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

24.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

25.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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.

27.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

28.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Weil, Simone

33.

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

Ciardi, John

34.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

35.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

36.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

37.

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

William Baziotes

38.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

39.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

40.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

41.

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

Ruskin, John

42.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

44.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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.

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

47.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

48.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

49.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

50.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques