Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Conrad, Joseph

Best Quotes about Art

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

Cioran, E. M.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

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

Berle, Adolf

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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

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

Dubuffet, Jean

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

10.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

11.

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.

12.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

13.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

14.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

15.

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

Truman, Harry S

16.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

17.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

18.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

19.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

20.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

21.

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

22.

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

Schumann, Robert

23.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

24.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

25.

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

26.

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

Gill, Eric

27.

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

28.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

29.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

30.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

31.

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

32.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

33.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

39.

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

Parker, Dorothy

40.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

41.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

42.

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

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

45.

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

46.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

47.

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

David Cronenberg

48.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

49.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

50.

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

Cather, Willa