Motivational Quotes

Art

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

- Richter, Jean Paul

Best Quotes about Art

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Waugh, Evelyn

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

10.

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

11.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

12.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

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

Riding, Laura

14.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

15.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

16.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

18.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

19.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

20.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

21.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

22.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

23.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

24.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

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.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

27.

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

Eliot, T. S.

28.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

29.

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

30.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

31.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

32.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

33.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

34.

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

35.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

36.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

40.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

41.

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

42.

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

Chopra, Deepak

43.

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

44.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

45.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

46.

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

47.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

50.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria