Motivational Quotes

Art

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

- Blair, Hugh

Best Quotes about Art

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Keller, Helen

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

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

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

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

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

10.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

11.

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

12.

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.

13.

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

14.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

15.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

16.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

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

Eugene Delacroix

18.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

19.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

20.

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

Simonides

21.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

22.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

23.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

24.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

25.

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

Kennedy, John F.

26.

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

Anderson, Judith

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, Chinese

29.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

30.

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.

31.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

33.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

34.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

35.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

36.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

37.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

38.

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

Parker, Dorothy

39.

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

West, Rebecca

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

42.

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

43.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

44.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

45.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

46.

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

47.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

48.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

49.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

50.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair