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

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

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

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

Varese, Edward

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

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

Berle, Adolf

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

10.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

11.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

12.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

13.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

14.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

15.

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

Cassady, Neal

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

20.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

21.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

22.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

23.

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

24.

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

Camus, Albert

25.

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.

26.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

27.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

28.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

29.

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

Burroughs, William S.

30.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

31.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

32.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

33.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

34.

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

Schumann, Robert

35.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

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

Al Capp

37.

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

38.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

39.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

40.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

41.

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

Riding, Laura

42.

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

43.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

44.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

45.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

46.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

47.

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

48.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

49.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

50.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von