Motivational Quotes

Art

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

- Aristophanes

Best Quotes about Art

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

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

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

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

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

10.

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

G. K. Chesterton

11.

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

Jacob, Max

12.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

13.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

14.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

15.

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

16.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

17.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

18.

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

John F. Kennedy

19.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

20.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

21.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

22.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

23.

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

24.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

25.

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

Churchill, Winston

26.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

27.

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

28.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

31.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

33.

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

Kennedy, John F.

34.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

35.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

36.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

37.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

38.

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

39.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

40.

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

Camus, Albert

41.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

42.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

43.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

44.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

45.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

46.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

47.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

48.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

49.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman