Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

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

Parker, Theodore

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

Kronenberger, Louis

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

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

Shakespeare, William

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

10.

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

11.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

12.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

13.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

14.

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

Proverb

15.

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

Frye, Northrop

16.

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

Kennedy, John F.

17.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

18.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

19.

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.

20.

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

Kael, Pauline

21.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

22.

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

Camus, Albert

23.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

26.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

27.

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

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.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

31.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

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

Shakespeare, William

33.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

34.

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

Motherwell, Robert

35.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

36.

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

37.

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

Eugene Delacroix

38.

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

39.

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

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.

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.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

43.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

44.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

45.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

47.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

48.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

49.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

50.

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