Motivational Quotes

Art

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

- Varese, Edward

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ben Shahn

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

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

Picasso, Pablo

11.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

12.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

13.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

14.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

15.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

16.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

20.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

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

22.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

26.

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

Pablo Picasso

27.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

28.

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

Joyce, James

29.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

30.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

31.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

32.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

33.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

34.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

35.

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

Picasso, Pablo

36.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

37.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

38.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

39.

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

Morris, William

40.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

41.

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

Ward Jenkins

42.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

43.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

44.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

45.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Riding, Laura

50.

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

Piet Mondrian