Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

- Reinhardt, Ad

Best Quotes about Art

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Frye, Northrop

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

14.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

15.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

16.

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

Anderson, Bill

17.

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

18.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

19.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

20.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

21.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

22.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

23.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

24.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

25.

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

26.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

27.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

28.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

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

33.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

34.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

35.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

36.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

37.

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

38.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

39.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

40.

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

Sand, George

41.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

42.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

43.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

45.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

46.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

47.

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

Pablo Picasso

48.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

49.

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

Camus, Albert

50.

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