Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

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

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

Jeff Melvoin

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

Lowell, James Russell

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

10.

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

11.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

12.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

13.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

14.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

15.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

16.

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

Murdoch, Iris

17.

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

Connolly, Cyril

18.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

19.

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

Riding, Laura

20.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

21.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

22.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

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.

24.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

25.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

26.

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

27.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

28.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

31.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

32.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

33.

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

34.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

36.

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

37.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

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

40.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

41.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

42.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

43.

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

44.

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

45.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

46.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

47.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

48.

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.

49.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

50.

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

Walt Whitman