Motivational Quotes

Art

Repetition is the death of art.

- Robin Green

Best Quotes about Art

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

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

John F. Kennedy

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.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

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.

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

12.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

13.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

14.

Love can heal a broken heart.

15.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

16.

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

17.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

18.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

19.

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

20.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

21.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

22.

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

Proverb

23.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

24.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

25.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

26.

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

Chopra, Deepak

27.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

28.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

29.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

30.

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

Weil, Simone

31.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

32.

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.

33.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

34.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Andre Gide

36.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

37.

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

38.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

39.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

40.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

41.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

42.

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

Murdoch, Iris

43.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

45.

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

Joyce, James

46.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

47.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

48.

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