Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Duke Ellington

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

Picasso, Pablo

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

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

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

11.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

12.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

13.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

14.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

15.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

16.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Updike, John

18.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

19.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Mann, Horace

23.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

25.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

26.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

27.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

29.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

30.

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

31.

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

Parker, Dorothy

32.

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

33.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

34.

Love can heal a broken heart.

35.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

37.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

38.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

39.

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

Piero Milani

40.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

42.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

43.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

44.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

45.

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

Anderson, Judith

46.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

47.

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.

48.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

49.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

50.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean