Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

- Reinhardt, Ad

Best Quotes about Art

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

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

Zola, Emile

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.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

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

10.

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

11.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

12.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

13.

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

Jackson Pollock

14.

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

15.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

16.

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

Kael, Pauline

17.

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

Riding, Laura

18.

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

19.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

20.

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

21.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

22.

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

23.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

24.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

25.

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

Eugene Delacroix

26.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

27.

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.

28.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

29.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

30.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

31.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

32.

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

33.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

34.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

35.

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

Wordsworth, William

36.

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

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

40.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

41.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

42.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

44.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

45.

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

Moses, Grandma

46.

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

Jeff Melvoin

47.

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

48.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste