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

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 sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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 either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

10.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

11.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

17.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Proverb, Chinese

21.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

26.

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

G. K. Chesterton

27.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

28.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

29.

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

Brown, John Mason

30.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

31.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

32.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

34.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

35.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

37.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

38.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

39.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

44.

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

Klee, Paul

45.

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

John F. Kennedy

46.

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)

47.

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

48.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

49.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

50.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore