Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Riding, Laura

Best Quotes about Art

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Murdoch, Iris

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

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

Jeff Melvoin

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Frost, Robert

17.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

18.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

19.

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

Driscoll, Louise

20.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

21.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

22.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

23.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

24.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

25.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

26.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

27.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

28.

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

Cather, Willa

29.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

30.

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

Shakespeare, William

31.

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

Kempis, Thomas

32.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

33.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

34.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

35.

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

Brown, John Mason

36.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

37.

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

Ovid

38.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

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

Anderson, Bill

40.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

41.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

42.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

43.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

44.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

45.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

46.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

47.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

50.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin