Motivational Quotes

Art

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

- Piet Mondrian

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

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

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

Kooning, Willem De

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Picasso, Pablo

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

Parker, Dorothy

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

10.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

11.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

12.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

13.

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

14.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

15.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

16.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

17.

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

18.

Love can heal a broken heart.

19.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

20.

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

21.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

22.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

23.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

24.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

25.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

26.

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

27.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

28.

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.

29.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

30.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

31.

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

Cather, Willa

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

36.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

37.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

41.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

42.

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

Melville, Herman

43.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

44.

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

Duke Ellington

45.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

46.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

47.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

48.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

49.

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

50.

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