Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Simonides

Best Quotes about Art

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

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

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

13.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

14.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

16.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

17.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

18.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

19.

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

20.

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

Riding, Laura

21.

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

Bible

22.

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.

23.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

24.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

25.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

26.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

27.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

28.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

29.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

30.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

31.

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

32.

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

Parker, Dorothy

33.

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

Gutzkow

34.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

35.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

36.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

37.

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

Ciardi, John

38.

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

39.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

40.

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

41.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

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

43.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

44.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

45.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

46.

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)

47.

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

Ruskin, John

48.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

49.

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

Brown, John Mason

50.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.