Motivational Quotes

Art

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

- Schumann, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

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

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

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

Einstein, Albert

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

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

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

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

10.

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

11.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

12.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Jeff Melvoin

14.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

19.

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

20.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

21.

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

Novalis

22.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

23.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

24.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

25.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

27.

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

Ben Shahn

28.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

29.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

30.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

31.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

33.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

34.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

35.

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

Duke Ellington

36.

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

37.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

38.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

39.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

40.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

41.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

42.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

43.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

44.

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

45.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

46.

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

47.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

48.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

49.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

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