Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Brown, John Mason

Best Quotes about Art

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

G. K. Chesterton

10.

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

David Cronenberg

11.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

12.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

13.

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

Moses, Grandma

14.

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

Ovid

15.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

17.

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

Wilson, Robert

18.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

19.

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

Arp, Jean

20.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

21.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

22.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

23.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

27.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

28.

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.

29.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

30.

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

Capp, Al

31.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

32.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

33.

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

Holyfield, Evander

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.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

36.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

39.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

40.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

41.

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

42.

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

Ovid

43.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

44.

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

45.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

46.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

47.

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

Eliot, T. S.

48.

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.

49.

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

Andre Gide

50.

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

Elizabeth Bowen