Motivational Quotes

Art

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Art

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

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

Ginsberg, Allen

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

Moses, Grandma

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

10.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

11.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

13.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

14.

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

15.

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

Warhol, Andy

16.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

17.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

18.

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

Bible

19.

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

Thurber, James

20.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

21.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

22.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

23.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

24.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

25.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

26.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

27.

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

Motherwell, Robert

28.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

29.

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

30.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

31.

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

Jackson Pollock

32.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

33.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

34.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

35.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

36.

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

37.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

39.

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

Wordsworth, William

40.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

41.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

42.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

46.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

47.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

48.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.