Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

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

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

10.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

11.

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.

12.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

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

Parker, Dorothy

14.

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

Keller, Helen

15.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

16.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

17.

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

18.

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

Capp, Al

19.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

20.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Lowell, James Russell

26.

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

John F. Kennedy

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.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

30.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

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

Warhol, Andy

34.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

35.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

37.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

38.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Edith Wharton

42.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

43.

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

44.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

45.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

46.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

49.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

50.

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