Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Art

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Kael, Pauline

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

10.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

11.

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

Blackie, Professor

12.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

13.

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

14.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

15.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

16.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

17.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

18.

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

19.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

20.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

21.

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

Cioran, E. M.

22.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

23.

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

24.

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

Keller, Helen

25.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

26.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

27.

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

Camus, Albert

28.

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

Anderson, Bill

29.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

30.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

31.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

32.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

33.

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

Picasso, Pablo

34.

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

Updike, John

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

40.

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

41.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

42.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

43.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

44.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

45.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

46.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

48.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

49.

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

Ambrose Bierce

50.

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