Motivational Quotes

Art

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Art

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Gutzkow

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Truman, Harry S

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

10.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

11.

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

12.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

13.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

14.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

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

17.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

18.

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

19.

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

20.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

21.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

22.

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

Brown, John Mason

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

25.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

26.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

27.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

28.

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

29.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

30.

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

31.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

32.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

33.

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

Conrad, Joseph

34.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

35.

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

36.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

37.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

39.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

40.

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.

41.

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

Gide, Andre

42.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

43.

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

Duke Ellington

44.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

45.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

46.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

49.

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

50.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert