Motivational Quotes

Art

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

- Cioran, E. M.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Ambrose Bierce

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Murdoch, Iris

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

10.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

11.

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

12.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

13.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

14.

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

15.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

16.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

17.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

18.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

19.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

20.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

21.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

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

Yu Cao

23.

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

Ward Jenkins

24.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

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

27.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

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

Parker, Dorothy

30.

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

Jacob, Max

31.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

32.

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

33.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

34.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

35.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

36.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

39.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

40.

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

41.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

42.

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.

43.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

44.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

45.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

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

Berle, Adolf

47.

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

48.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

49.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

50.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al