Motivational Quotes

Art

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Art

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

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

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

10.

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

Camus, Albert

11.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

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

13.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

14.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

18.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

19.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

20.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

21.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

22.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

23.

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

24.

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

Anderson, Bill

25.

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

26.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

27.

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

Isak Dineson

28.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

29.

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

30.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

31.

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

Keller, Helen

32.

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

Eliot, T. S.

33.

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

Motherwell, Robert

34.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

35.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

36.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

37.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

40.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

41.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

42.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

43.

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

Jackson Pollock

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

48.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

49.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

50.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.