Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Art

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

Love can heal a broken heart.

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

Sand, George

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

Frost, Robert

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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

Parker, Dorothy

10.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

15.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

17.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

18.

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

Anderson, Bill

19.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

20.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

21.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

22.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

23.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

24.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

25.

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

John F. Kennedy

26.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

27.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

28.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

31.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

32.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

33.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

34.

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

Duke Ellington

35.

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

Andre Gide

36.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

37.

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

Ruskin, John

38.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

44.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

45.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

46.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

47.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

48.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

49.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

50.

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