Motivational Quotes

Art

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Art

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

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

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

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

10.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

11.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

12.

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

Anderson, Bill

13.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

14.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

15.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

17.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

18.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

19.

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

Truman, Harry S

20.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

21.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

22.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

23.

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

George Tooker

24.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

25.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

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.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

29.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

30.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

34.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

35.

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

36.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

37.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

38.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

40.

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

41.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

42.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

43.

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

Kael, Pauline

44.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

45.

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

Kempis, Thomas

46.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

47.

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

48.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo