Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- George Tooker

Best Quotes about Art

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

Jacob, Max

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.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Keller, Helen

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

11.

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

12.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

13.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

14.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

15.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

16.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

17.

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

18.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

19.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

20.

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

21.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

22.

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

23.

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

Andre Gide

24.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

25.

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

26.

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

27.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

28.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

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

Ambrose Bierce

30.

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

Proust, Marcel

31.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

32.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

33.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

35.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

36.

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

37.

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

Al Capp

38.

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

Novalis

39.

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

40.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

41.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

43.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

44.

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

45.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

46.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

47.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

48.

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

Gide, Andre