Motivational Quotes

Art

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

- Keller, Helen

Best Quotes about Art

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

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

William Baziotes

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

10.

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

Ciardi, John

11.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

13.

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

14.

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

Murdoch, Iris

15.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

16.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

17.

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

Churchill, Winston

18.

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

Lowell, James Russell

19.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

20.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

21.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

22.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

23.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

24.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

25.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

26.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

27.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

28.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

30.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

31.

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

32.

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

33.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

38.

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

Kooning, Willem De

39.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

40.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

41.

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

42.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

43.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

44.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

45.

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

46.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

47.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

48.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

49.

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

50.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.