Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Capp, Al

Best Quotes about Art

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

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

Morris, William

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

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

10.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

12.

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

Bible

13.

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

14.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

15.

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

16.

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

Gide, Andre

17.

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

Camus, Albert

18.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

19.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

20.

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

21.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

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

24.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

25.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

26.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

28.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

29.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

30.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

31.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

33.

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

34.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

35.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

36.

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

Berle, Adolf

37.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

38.

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.

39.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

40.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

41.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

42.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

43.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

44.

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

Moses, Grandma

45.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

46.

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

47.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

48.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

49.

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

Midler, Bette

50.

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