Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

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

Riding, Laura

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

Camus, Albert

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

10.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

11.

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

Shakespeare, William

12.

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

Frye, Northrop

13.

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

Blackie, Professor

14.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

17.

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

Parker, Dorothy

18.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

19.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

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

21.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

22.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

23.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

24.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

25.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

26.

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

William Baziotes

27.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

28.

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

29.

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

30.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

31.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

32.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

33.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

34.

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

Holyfield, Evander

35.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

36.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

37.

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

38.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

39.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

40.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

41.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

42.

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

Ruskin, John

43.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

44.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

45.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

46.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

48.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

49.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

50.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen