Motivational Quotes

Art

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

- Tagore, Rabindranath

Best Quotes about Art

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

Jeff Melvoin

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

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

Simonides

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

Sand, George

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

Proust, Marcel

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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

10.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

11.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

12.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

16.

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

17.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

18.

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

Varese, Edward

19.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

20.

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

Al Capp

21.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

22.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

23.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

25.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

26.

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

27.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

28.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

Parker, Dorothy

30.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

31.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

32.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

33.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

34.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

35.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

36.

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

Eliot, T. S.

37.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

38.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

40.

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

Kael, Pauline

41.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

42.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

43.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

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

Brown, John Mason

45.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

46.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

47.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

48.

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

49.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

50.

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

Cioran, E. M.