Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

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.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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

Churchill, Winston

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

11.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

12.

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

Riding, Laura

13.

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

Picasso, Pablo

14.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

15.

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

16.

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

Shakespeare, William

17.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

18.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

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.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

21.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

23.

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

Duke Ellington

24.

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

25.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

26.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

27.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

28.

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

29.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

30.

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

Parker, Theodore

31.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

32.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

34.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

35.

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

Wilson, Robert

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.

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.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

39.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

Jeff Melvoin

43.

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

44.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

45.

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

George Tooker

46.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

47.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.