Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Frye, Northrop

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

10.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

11.

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

Sand, George

12.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

13.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

14.

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

15.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

17.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

18.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

19.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

20.

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

21.

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

22.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

25.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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

27.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

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

Cassady, Neal

29.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

30.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

31.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

38.

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

39.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

40.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

41.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

42.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.