Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

Simonides

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

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

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

Connolly, Cyril

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

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

David Cronenberg

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

12.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

13.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

15.

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

Novalis

16.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

18.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

19.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

20.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

21.

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

Bangs, Lester

22.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

23.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Brown, John Mason

28.

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

Berle, Adolf

29.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

31.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

32.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

33.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

34.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

35.

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

36.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

37.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

42.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

43.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

44.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

45.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

46.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

47.

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

48.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

50.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo