Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Ovid

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

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

Capp, Al

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

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

Ionesco, Eugene

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

10.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

11.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

12.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

13.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

14.

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

15.

Love can heal a broken heart.

16.

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

Walt Whitman

17.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

18.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

19.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

20.

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

21.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

22.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

23.

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

Isak Dineson

24.

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

25.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

26.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

27.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

28.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

29.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

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

32.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

33.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

34.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

35.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

36.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

37.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

38.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

41.

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

42.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

43.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

44.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

45.

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

Motherwell, Robert

46.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

47.

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

Wilson, Robert

48.

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

49.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

50.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris