Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Art

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

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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

Simonides

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

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

10.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

11.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

12.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

13.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

14.

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

Sand, George

15.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

16.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

17.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

18.

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

19.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

20.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

21.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

27.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

28.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

29.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

30.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

34.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

35.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

36.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

38.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

39.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

40.

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

Parker, Dorothy

41.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

44.

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

45.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

46.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

47.

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

Moses, Grandma

48.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

49.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

50.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise