Motivational Quotes

Art

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

- Wilde, Oscar

Best Quotes about Art

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

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

Brancusi, Constantin

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

10.

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.

11.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

13.

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

Pablo Picasso

14.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

15.

Love can heal a broken heart.

16.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

17.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

18.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

19.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

20.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

21.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

22.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

23.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

24.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

25.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

26.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

27.

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

28.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

29.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

30.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

31.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

32.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

33.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

34.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

35.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

36.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

37.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

38.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

40.

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

41.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

Churchill, Winston

43.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

44.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

45.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

46.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

47.

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.

48.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

49.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

50.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De