Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Buckingham, Duke of

Best Quotes about Art

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

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

Riding, Laura

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Ciardi, John

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

10.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

11.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

12.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

13.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

14.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

15.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

16.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

17.

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

Midler, Bette

18.

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

19.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

20.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

21.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

22.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

23.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

24.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

25.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

27.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

28.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

29.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

32.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

33.

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

Melville, Herman

34.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

35.

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

36.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

40.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

41.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

42.

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

Gide, Andre

43.

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

Burroughs, William S.

44.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

45.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

46.

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

Klee, Paul

47.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

48.

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

49.

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

Warhol, Andy

50.

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