Motivational Quotes

Art

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

- Carter, Angela

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kennedy, John F.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Connolly, Cyril

10.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

11.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

13.

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.

14.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

18.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

23.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

24.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

25.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

26.

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

Cather, Willa

27.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

28.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

29.

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.

30.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

31.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

32.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

33.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

34.

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

35.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

G. K. Chesterton

41.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

42.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

43.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

44.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

45.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

46.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

47.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]