Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

Bierce, Ambrose

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Novalis

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

M. C. Richards

10.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

11.

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

Updike, John

12.

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

Burroughs, William S.

13.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

14.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

15.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

16.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

17.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

18.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

19.

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

20.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

21.

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

Brown, John Mason

22.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

23.

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

24.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

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

26.

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

Murdoch, Iris

27.

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

Jackson Pollock

28.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

29.

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

30.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

31.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

32.

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.

33.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

34.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

35.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

36.

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

37.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

38.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

40.

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

Thurber, James

41.

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

42.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

43.

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

44.

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

Yu Cao

45.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

46.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

47.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.