Motivational Quotes

Art

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

- Baldwin, James

Best Quotes about Art

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

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

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

Peri, Gabriel

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

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

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

Thurber, James

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

10.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

11.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

12.

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

Proverb

13.

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.

14.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

15.

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

16.

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

Connolly, Cyril

17.

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

Duke Ellington

18.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

20.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

21.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

22.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

23.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

24.

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

25.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

26.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

28.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

30.

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

31.

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

32.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

33.

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

34.

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

John F. Kennedy

35.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

36.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

37.

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

Ward Jenkins

38.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

39.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

40.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

41.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

42.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

44.

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

45.

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

Frye, Northrop

46.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

47.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

49.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

50.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.