Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules 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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

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

Bible

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

G. K. Chesterton

10.

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

Pascal, Blaise

11.

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

Brown, John Mason

12.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

13.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

18.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

19.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

20.

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

21.

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

22.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

23.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

24.

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

Gide, Andre

25.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

26.

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.

27.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

28.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

29.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

30.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

31.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

32.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

34.

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

Berle, Adolf

35.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

36.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

37.

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

38.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

39.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

44.

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

45.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

46.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

47.

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

Anderson, Bill

48.

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.