Motivational Quotes

Art

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

- Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Best Quotes about Art

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

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

Paz, Octavio

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

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

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

10.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

11.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

12.

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

13.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

14.

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

15.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

16.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

17.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

18.

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

19.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

20.

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

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

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

David Cronenberg

23.

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

24.

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

Moses, Grandma

25.

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

26.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

27.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

28.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

29.

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

Jeff Melvoin

30.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

31.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

32.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

33.

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

John F. Kennedy

34.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

35.

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

36.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

37.

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

38.

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

Varese, Edward

39.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

40.

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

41.

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

Picasso, Pablo

42.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

43.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

44.

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

45.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

46.

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

47.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

48.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

49.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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

Duke Ellington