Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

10.

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

Ben Shahn

11.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

12.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

13.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

14.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

15.

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

16.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

17.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

18.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

19.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

20.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

21.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

22.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

23.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

24.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

25.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

27.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

28.

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

Churchill, Winston

29.

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

30.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

31.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

32.

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

John F. Kennedy

33.

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

Lowell, James Russell

34.

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

35.

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

Weil, Simone

36.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

37.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

38.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

39.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

40.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

41.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

42.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

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

Anderson, Judith

44.

Repetition is the death of art.