Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Art

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

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

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

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

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

10.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

11.

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

12.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

13.

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

14.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

15.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

17.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

18.

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

Morris, William

19.

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

Ciardi, John

20.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

21.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

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

Cather, Willa

24.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

25.

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

26.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

28.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

29.

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.

30.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

35.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

37.

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

Sand, George

38.

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.

39.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

40.

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

Joyce, James

41.

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

42.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

43.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

45.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.