Motivational Quotes

Art

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Art

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

Schumann, Robert

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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

Parker, Dorothy

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

10.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

11.

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

Proverb, Chinese

12.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

13.

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

14.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

15.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

16.

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

Camus, Albert

17.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

18.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

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.

20.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

21.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

22.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

23.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

24.

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

25.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

26.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

27.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

28.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

29.

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

Churchill, Winston

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

32.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

G. K. Chesterton

34.

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

35.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

36.

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

David Cronenberg

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

42.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

43.

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

Jackson Pollock

44.

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

45.

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

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.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

48.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

49.

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

50.

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

Kennedy, John F.