Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Renoir, Pierre Auguste

Best Quotes about Art

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

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

Duke Ellington

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

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

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

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

10.

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

11.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

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

13.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

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

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

17.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

18.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

19.

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

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Proverb

23.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

24.

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

25.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

26.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

27.

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

28.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

32.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

37.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

39.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

42.

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

Camus, Albert

43.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

44.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

45.

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

46.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

47.

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

48.

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

Moses, Grandma

49.

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

Driscoll, Louise

50.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid