Motivational Quotes

Art

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

- Rodin, Auguste

Best Quotes about Art

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

Henry Ward Beecher

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Joyce, James

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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

Cather, Willa

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

10.

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

Riding, Laura

11.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

12.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

13.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

14.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

15.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

16.

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

17.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

18.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

19.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

20.

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

21.

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

David Cronenberg

22.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

23.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

24.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

25.

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

26.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

27.

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

28.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

29.

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

Klee, Paul

30.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

31.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

32.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

33.

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

34.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

35.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

36.

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

Holyfield, Evander

37.

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

Bangs, Lester

38.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

39.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

44.

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

45.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

46.

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

47.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

48.

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

49.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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