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

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

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Klee, Paul

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

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

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

Ben Shahn

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

Isak Dineson

10.

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

Moses, Grandma

11.

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

Wilson, Robert

12.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

13.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

14.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

15.

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

16.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

20.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

21.

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

22.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

23.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

24.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

25.

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

26.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

27.

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.

28.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

29.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

30.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

31.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

33.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

34.

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

35.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

36.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

37.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

38.

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

Jackson Pollock

39.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

40.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

41.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

42.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

43.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

44.

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

Einstein, Albert

45.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

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

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

49.

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

Proverb, Chinese

50.

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