Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

- Bowen, Elizabeth

Best Quotes about Art

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

Lowell, James Russell

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

10.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

11.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

12.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

13.

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

14.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

15.

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

16.

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

17.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

18.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

19.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

20.

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

Parker, Dorothy

21.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

22.

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

23.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

24.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

28.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

29.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

30.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

33.

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

Mann, Horace

34.

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

Paz, Octavio

35.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

36.

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

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.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

39.

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

Proverb, Chinese

40.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

41.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

42.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

43.

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

44.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

45.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

49.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

50.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.