Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Jeff Melvoin

Best Quotes about Art

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

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

10.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

11.

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

Proverb, Chinese

12.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

16.

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

17.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

18.

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

Kooning, Willem De

19.

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.

20.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

21.

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

Keller, Helen

22.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

23.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

24.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

25.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

26.

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

27.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

28.

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

29.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

30.

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

Wilson, Robert

31.

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

32.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

33.

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

Novalis

34.

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

Frye, Northrop

35.

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

Parker, Theodore

36.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

37.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

40.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

Gide, Andre

44.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

45.

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

Varese, Edward

46.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

47.

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

48.

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

49.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette