Motivational Quotes

Art

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

- Stein, Gertrude

Best Quotes about Art

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

Wilson, Robert

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

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Holyfield, Evander

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

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

10.

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

11.

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

Parker, Dorothy

12.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

13.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

14.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

15.

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

16.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

17.

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

Al Capp

18.

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

Novalis

19.

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

Morris, William

20.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

21.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

22.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

23.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

24.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

25.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

26.

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

27.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

28.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

29.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

30.

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

Jacob, Max

31.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

33.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

34.

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

35.

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

Shakespeare, William

36.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

37.

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

Ciardi, John

38.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

39.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

40.

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

41.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

42.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

43.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

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

45.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

46.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

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

48.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

49.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

50.

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

Riding, Laura