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

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Murdoch, Iris

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

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

George Tooker

10.

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

Duke Ellington

11.

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

Parker, Dorothy

12.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

13.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

15.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

16.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

17.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

18.

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

Jeff Melvoin

19.

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

Berle, Adolf

20.

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

David Cronenberg

21.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

22.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

23.

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

Eliot, T. S.

24.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

25.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

26.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

27.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

28.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

29.

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

Kael, Pauline

30.

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

31.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

32.

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

Ovid

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

36.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

37.

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

38.

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

39.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

40.

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

41.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

42.

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

Keller, Helen

43.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

44.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

45.

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

46.

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

Isak Dineson

47.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

48.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

49.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.