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

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

Kael, Pauline

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

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

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Duke Ellington

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

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

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

Jeff Melvoin

10.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

11.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

12.

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

13.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

14.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Proverb, Chinese

18.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

19.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

20.

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

21.

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

Simonides

22.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

23.

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

24.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

25.

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

Sand, George

26.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

27.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

28.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

29.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

30.

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

31.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

32.

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

Mann, Horace

33.

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

Gide, Andre

34.

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

35.

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

Cioran, E. M.

36.

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

37.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

38.

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

Pascal, Blaise

39.

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

40.

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

Kempis, Thomas

41.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

42.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

43.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

44.

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

Shakespeare, William

45.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

46.

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

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

49.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

50.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.