Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

10.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

11.

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

12.

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

Andre Gide

13.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

14.

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

Keller, Helen

15.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

16.

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

17.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

20.

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

Klee, Paul

21.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

22.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

Ben Shahn

24.

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

Jackson Pollock

25.

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

Piet Mondrian

26.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

27.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

28.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

29.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

30.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

31.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

32.

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

33.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

34.

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

Duke Ellington

35.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

36.

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

37.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

38.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

39.

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.

40.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

41.

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

42.

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

Arp, Jean

43.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

44.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

45.

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

46.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

48.

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

49.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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