Motivational Quotes

Art

O, had I but followed the arts!

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Art

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

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

Gutzkow

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

Shakespeare, William

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

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

Murdoch, Iris

10.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

11.

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

Ward Jenkins

12.

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

13.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

17.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Mann, Horace

23.

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

Morris, William

24.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

25.

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

26.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

27.

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

28.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

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

31.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

32.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

33.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

34.

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

35.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Proverb, Chinese

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

40.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

41.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

42.

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.

43.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

44.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

45.

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

Connolly, Cyril

46.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

48.

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

49.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

50.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington