Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

Camus, Albert

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

Murdoch, Iris

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

Ruskin, John

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

10.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

11.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

13.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

14.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

15.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

17.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

18.

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

Morris, William

19.

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

Truman, Harry S

20.

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

21.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

22.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

23.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

24.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

25.

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

26.

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

Berle, Adolf

27.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

32.

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

Proverb, Chinese

33.

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

34.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

35.

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

Updike, John

36.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

37.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

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

39.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

40.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

41.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

42.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

43.

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

44.

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

45.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

46.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

47.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

48.

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

49.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

50.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert