Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Art

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

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

Schumann, Robert

10.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

11.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

12.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

13.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

14.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

15.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

16.

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

17.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

18.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

19.

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

Conrad, Joseph

20.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

21.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

22.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Cather, Willa

27.

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

28.

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

Jackson Pollock

29.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

30.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

John F. Kennedy

34.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

35.

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

Ward Jenkins

36.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

37.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

38.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

39.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

40.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

41.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

42.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

43.

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.

44.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

45.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

46.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

47.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

48.

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

Churchill, Winston

49.

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

50.

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