Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Camus, Albert

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

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

Motherwell, Robert

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

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

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

Melville, Herman

10.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

11.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

12.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

13.

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

14.

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

Thurber, James

15.

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

16.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

17.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

18.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

19.

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

20.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

21.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

22.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

23.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

24.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

25.

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

Bangs, Lester

26.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

27.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

28.

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

29.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

30.

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

William Baziotes

31.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

32.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

33.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

34.

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

Wordsworth, William

35.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

36.

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

West, Rebecca

37.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

38.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

42.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

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.

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

Al Capp

45.

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

46.

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

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.

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

49.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

50.

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