Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Bierce, Ambrose

Best Quotes about Art

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

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

William Baziotes

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

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

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

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

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

10.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

11.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

12.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

13.

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

14.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

15.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

16.

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

17.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

18.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

19.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

20.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

21.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

22.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

23.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

24.

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

Murdoch, Iris

25.

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

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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

27.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

28.

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

Ruskin, John

29.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

30.

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

David Cronenberg

31.

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

Kennedy, John F.

32.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

33.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

38.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

39.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

43.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

44.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

45.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

46.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

47.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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