Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist was first an amateur.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

10.

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

11.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

12.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

13.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

14.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

15.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

16.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Sand, George

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

20.

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

Duke Ellington

21.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

22.

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

Arp, Jean

23.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

24.

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

25.

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

Shakespeare, William

26.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

27.

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

Brown, John Mason

28.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

29.

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

30.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

32.

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

Camus, Albert

33.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

35.

Love can heal a broken heart.

36.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

37.

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

Burroughs, William S.

38.

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

39.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

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

41.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

42.

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

43.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

44.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

45.

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

Simonides

46.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

47.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

48.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

49.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

50.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.