Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Wilson, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Anderson, Bill

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

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

10.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

11.

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

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

14.

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

Bangs, Lester

15.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

16.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

17.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

18.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

19.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

20.

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

21.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

22.

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

23.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

24.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

25.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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.

30.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

31.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

Klee, Paul

33.

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

34.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

35.

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

36.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

37.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

38.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

39.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

40.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

41.

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

Eliot, T. S.

42.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

43.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

44.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

48.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

49.

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

Motherwell, Robert

50.

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

G. K. Chesterton