Motivational Quotes

Art

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

- Ambrose Bierce

Best Quotes about Art

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

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

Frye, Northrop

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

Jackson Pollock

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Motherwell, Robert

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

11.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

12.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

13.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

14.

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

Woodberry, George E.

15.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

16.

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

Thurber, James

17.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

18.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

19.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

20.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

21.

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

22.

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

Eliot, T. S.

23.

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

24.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

25.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

26.

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

27.

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

Ben Shahn

28.

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

29.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

30.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

31.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

37.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

38.

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

Sand, George

39.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

40.

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

Peri, Gabriel

41.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

42.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Proverb, Chinese

46.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

47.

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

Shakespeare, William

48.

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

Capp, Al

49.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

50.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.