Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Simonides

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

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

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

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

Arp, Jean

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

Duke Ellington

10.

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

Proust, Marcel

11.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

12.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

13.

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

John F. Kennedy

14.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

15.

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

16.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

17.

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

Sand, George

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

21.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

22.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

23.

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

Cioran, E. M.

24.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

25.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

26.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

28.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

29.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

32.

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

Shakespeare, William

33.

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

Berle, Adolf

34.

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

35.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

41.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

42.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

43.

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

44.

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

Pascal, Blaise

45.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

46.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

47.

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

48.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

49.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

50.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo