Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

Blackie, Professor

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

Jeff Melvoin

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

Proust, Marcel

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

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

10.

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

11.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

12.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

13.

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

14.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

15.

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

Ambrose Bierce

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

20.

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

Keller, Helen

21.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

22.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

23.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

24.

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

25.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

26.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

27.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

28.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

29.

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

Churchill, Winston

30.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

31.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

32.

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

33.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

34.

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

35.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

36.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

37.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

38.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

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

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Isak Dineson

42.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

43.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

44.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

45.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

46.

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

Capp, Al

47.

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

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

49.

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

50.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John