Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Smith, Logan Pearsall

Best Quotes about Art

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

Sand, George

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

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

Shakespeare, William

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

10.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

11.

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

Frye, Northrop

12.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

13.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

14.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

15.

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

16.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

17.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

18.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

19.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

George Tooker

21.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

27.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

28.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

29.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

30.

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

31.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

32.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

33.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

35.

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

Moses, Grandma

36.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

37.

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

Motherwell, Robert

38.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

39.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

40.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

41.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

42.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

43.

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

44.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

45.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

46.

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

William Baziotes

47.

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

Ambrose Bierce

48.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

49.

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

50.

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