Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Suttner, Bertha Von

Best Quotes about Art

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

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

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

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

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

10.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

11.

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

Ruskin, John

12.

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

13.

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

Mann, Horace

14.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

17.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

18.

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

19.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

20.

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

21.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

22.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

23.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

24.

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

William Baziotes

25.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

26.

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

Sand, George

27.

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

Proverb, Chinese

28.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

29.

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

Cioran, E. M.

30.

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

31.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

32.

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

33.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

35.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

36.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

39.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

40.

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

41.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

42.

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

Holyfield, Evander

43.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

47.

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

Al Capp

48.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

49.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

50.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert