Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist was first an amateur.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kronenberger, Louis

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

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

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

10.

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

11.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

12.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

13.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

14.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

15.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

16.

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

17.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

18.

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

Kooning, Willem De

19.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

20.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

21.

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

Thurber, James

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

25.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

26.

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

Shakespeare, William

27.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

28.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

29.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

30.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

31.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

32.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

33.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

34.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

35.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

38.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

39.

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.

40.

What I dream of is an art of balance.