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

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

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

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Motherwell, Robert

10.

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.

11.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

12.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

13.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

14.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

15.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

Ciardi, John

17.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

18.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

19.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

20.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

21.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

22.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

23.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

24.

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

Jeff Melvoin

25.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

26.

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

27.

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

Berle, Adolf

28.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

29.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

30.

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.

31.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

32.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

33.

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

34.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

35.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

36.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

37.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

38.

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

39.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

41.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

42.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

43.

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.

44.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

45.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

47.

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

48.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

49.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

50.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.