Motivational Quotes

Art

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

- Benjamin, Walter

Best Quotes about Art

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

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

10.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

11.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

12.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

13.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

14.

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

15.

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

Camus, Albert

16.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

20.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

21.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

22.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

23.

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

24.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

25.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

26.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

29.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

30.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

32.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

33.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

34.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

35.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

36.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

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

38.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

41.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

42.

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

43.

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

Proverb, Chinese

44.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

45.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

46.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

47.

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

Churchill, Winston

48.

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

Gill, Eric

49.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

50.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.