Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Art

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

Shakespeare, William

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

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

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

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

George Tooker

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

West, Rebecca

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Motherwell, Robert

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

10.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Churchill, Winston

14.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

15.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

16.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

17.

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

Kael, Pauline

18.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

G. K. Chesterton

20.

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

Sand, George

21.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

22.

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

23.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

24.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

25.

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

Gutzkow

26.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

27.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

28.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

29.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

30.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

31.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

32.

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

33.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

34.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

35.

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

Proverb

36.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

37.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

38.

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

39.

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

40.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

41.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

42.

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

Parker, Dorothy

43.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

44.

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

45.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

46.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

47.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

48.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.