Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Henry Ward Beecher

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

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

Peri, Gabriel

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

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

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

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

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

Ben Shahn

11.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

12.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

13.

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

14.

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

Ciardi, John

15.

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

Brown, John Mason

16.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

17.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

18.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

19.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

20.

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

Burroughs, William S.

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

25.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

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

27.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

28.

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

Riding, Laura

29.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

30.

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

Picasso, Pablo

31.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

32.

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

Joyce, James

33.

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

34.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

35.

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

Sand, George

36.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

37.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

38.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

39.

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

40.

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

Mann, Horace

41.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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

43.

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

44.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

45.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

46.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

47.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

48.

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

49.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

50.

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

Morris, William