Motivational Quotes

Art

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

- Connolly, Cyril

Best Quotes about Art

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

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

Edith Wharton

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

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.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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

Camus, Albert

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

10.

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

11.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

16.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

17.

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

Schumann, Robert

18.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

19.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

20.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

21.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

22.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

23.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

24.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

25.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

26.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

27.

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

28.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

29.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

30.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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

M. C. Richards

32.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

33.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

34.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

37.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

38.

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

39.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

42.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

43.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

45.

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

Pascal, Blaise

46.

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

47.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

48.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

Thurber, James

50.

Every artist was first an amateur.