Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Piet Mondrian

Best Quotes about Art

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

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

Waugh, Evelyn

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Thurber, James

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

11.

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

Varese, Edward

12.

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

Camus, Albert

13.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

14.

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

Ruskin, John

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Klee, Paul

18.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

19.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

20.

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

Wordsworth, William

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

24.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

25.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

26.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

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

28.

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

West, Rebecca

29.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

30.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

31.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

32.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

33.

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

Ambrose Bierce

34.

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

Andre Gide

35.

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

36.

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

37.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

38.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

42.

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

43.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

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

45.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

46.

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

47.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

48.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

49.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.