Motivational Quotes

Art

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

- Geldzahler, Henry

Best Quotes about Art

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

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

Woodberry, George E.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Jeff Melvoin

10.

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

Eliot, T. S.

11.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

14.

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

15.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

16.

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

17.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

18.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

19.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

20.

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.

21.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

22.

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

Wilson, Robert

23.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

28.

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

William Baziotes

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.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

33.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

34.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

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

36.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

37.

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

38.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

39.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

40.

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

41.

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

42.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

43.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

44.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

45.

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

46.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

47.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

48.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

49.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

50.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.