Motivational Quotes

Art

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

- Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Best Quotes about Art

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

Proverb

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

Proust, Marcel

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

10.

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

11.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

12.

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

13.

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

Proverb, Chinese

14.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

15.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

16.

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

17.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

18.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

19.

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

20.

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

21.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

23.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

24.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

25.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

26.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

27.

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

Picasso, Pablo

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

30.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

35.

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

36.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

37.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

38.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

41.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

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

John F. Kennedy

43.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

44.

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

45.

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

Klee, Paul

46.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

47.

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