Motivational Quotes

Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

- Berger, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

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

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Wolfe, Thomas

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 signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

10.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Picasso, Pablo

12.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

13.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

14.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

15.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

16.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

17.

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

18.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

19.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

20.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

21.

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

Jeff Melvoin

22.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

23.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

24.

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

25.

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

Jackson Pollock

26.

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

Berle, Adolf

27.

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

Simonides

28.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

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.

30.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

31.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

32.

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

33.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

34.

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

Ben Shahn

35.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

36.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

37.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

38.

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

39.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

40.

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

41.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

42.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

43.

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

Anderson, Bill

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.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

47.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock