Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Andre Gide

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

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

Camus, Albert

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.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

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

Ward Jenkins

10.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

11.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

13.

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.

14.

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

Novalis

15.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

16.

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

Joyce, James

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

20.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

21.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

22.

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

23.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

24.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

25.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

26.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

27.

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

28.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

29.

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

Frye, Northrop

30.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

31.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

32.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

33.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

35.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

36.

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

37.

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

Wilson, Robert

38.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

40.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

41.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

42.

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

Gill, Eric

43.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

44.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

45.

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

46.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

47.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

48.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

49.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

50.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent