Motivational Quotes

Art

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

- Camus, Albert

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Jeff Melvoin

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

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

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

John F. Kennedy

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

Gide, Andre

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

Isak Dineson

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

10.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

11.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

12.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

13.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

14.

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

Eliot, T. S.

15.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

17.

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.

18.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

19.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

20.

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

21.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

22.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

23.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

24.

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

25.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

26.

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

Melville, Herman

27.

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

28.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

29.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

31.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

33.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

34.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

35.

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

36.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

37.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

38.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

39.

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

40.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

42.

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

43.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

45.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

46.

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

Thurber, James

47.

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

48.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

49.

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

50.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock