Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Wolfe, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

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

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

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

10.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

11.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

12.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

14.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

15.

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

16.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

17.

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

Weil, Simone

18.

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

19.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

20.

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

Motherwell, Robert

21.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

22.

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

Bible

23.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

24.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

26.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

27.

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

28.

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

Jeff Melvoin

29.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

30.

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

Cather, Willa

31.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

33.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

34.

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

35.

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

Simonides

36.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

37.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

38.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

39.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

40.

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

41.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

42.

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

43.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

44.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

45.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

46.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

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

48.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

49.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

50.

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

Brancusi, Constantin