Motivational Quotes

Art

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

- Walt Whitman

Best Quotes about Art

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

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.

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

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

10.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

11.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

12.

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

13.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

15.

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

Ovid

16.

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

17.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

18.

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

19.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

20.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

21.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

22.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

23.

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

Eliot, T. S.

24.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

25.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

26.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

27.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

28.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

29.

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

30.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

31.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

32.

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

Einstein, Albert

33.

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

34.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

35.

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

Bible

36.

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

Al Capp

37.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

38.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

39.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

40.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

41.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

42.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

44.

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

Wilson, Robert

45.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

46.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

47.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

49.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

50.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo