Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Cather, Willa

Best Quotes about Art

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

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

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

Berle, Adolf

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

10.

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

Jackson Pollock

11.

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

Truman, Harry S

12.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

13.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

14.

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

15.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

16.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

18.

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

19.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

20.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

21.

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

Gutzkow

22.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

23.

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

24.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Shakespeare, William

27.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

28.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

29.

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)

30.

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

Warhol, Andy

31.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

33.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

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

35.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

36.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

38.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

39.

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

Riding, Laura

40.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

41.

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

42.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

43.

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

44.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

45.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

46.

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

47.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

48.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

49.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

50.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max