Motivational Quotes

Art

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

- Poe, Edgar Allan

Best Quotes about Art

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Camus, Albert

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

Mann, Horace

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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

John F. Kennedy

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

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

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

10.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

11.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

12.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

14.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

15.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

16.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

17.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

18.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

19.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

20.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

21.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

22.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

24.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

25.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

26.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

27.

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

Cather, Willa

28.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

29.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Wilson, Robert

31.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

32.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

33.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

34.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

35.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

36.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Sand, George

39.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

40.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

41.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

42.

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

43.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

44.

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

45.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

46.

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

47.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

48.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

49.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

50.

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

Proverb, Chinese