Motivational Quotes

Art

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

- Ben Shahn

Best Quotes about Art

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

Sand, George

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

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

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Pascal, Blaise

10.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

13.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

14.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

15.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

19.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

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

21.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

22.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

23.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

24.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

25.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

26.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

27.

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

Bellow, Saul

28.

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

29.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

30.

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

Parker, Dorothy

31.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

32.

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

33.

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

Einstein, Albert

34.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

37.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

38.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

39.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

40.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

41.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

42.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

44.

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

45.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

46.

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

West, Rebecca

47.

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

Updike, John

48.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

49.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

50.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura