Motivational Quotes

Art

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

- Crowley, Aleister

Best Quotes about Art

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

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

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

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

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

10.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

13.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

14.

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

15.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

16.

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

17.

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

Holyfield, Evander

18.

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

19.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

20.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

21.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

22.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

24.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

25.

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

Picasso, Pablo

26.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

27.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

28.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

29.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

30.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

31.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

33.

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

34.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

35.

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

Gill, Eric

36.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

37.

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

38.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

39.

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

40.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

41.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

42.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

44.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

45.

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

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

48.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

49.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

50.

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