Motivational Quotes

Art

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

- Renoir, Pierre Auguste

Best Quotes about Art

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

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

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

Novalis

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Kooning, Willem De

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

Weil, Simone

10.

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

Ben Shahn

11.

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

12.

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

Cather, Willa

13.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

14.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

15.

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

16.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

17.

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

18.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

19.

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

20.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

21.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb

24.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

25.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

26.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

27.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

28.

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

Melville, Herman

29.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

32.

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

33.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

34.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

35.

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.

36.

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

Gill, Eric

37.

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

38.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

39.

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

Al Capp

40.

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

Updike, John

41.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

42.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

43.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

44.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

45.

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

46.

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

Churchill, Winston

47.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

48.

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

Ciardi, John

49.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

50.

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