Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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.

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

10.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

11.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

12.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

13.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

14.

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

15.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

16.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

17.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

18.

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

Cioran, E. M.

19.

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

20.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

21.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

22.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

23.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

24.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

25.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

26.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

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

Schumann, Robert

28.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

29.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

30.

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

31.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

32.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

33.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Arp, Jean

38.

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

Ciardi, John

39.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

40.

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

41.

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

Riding, Laura

42.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

46.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

47.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

48.

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

Keller, Helen

49.

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

Ben Shahn

50.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry