Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Keller, Helen

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

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

10.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

13.

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

14.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

17.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

19.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

20.

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

21.

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

Pascal, Blaise

22.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

23.

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

Thurber, James

24.

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

Jovovich, Milla

25.

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

26.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

27.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

28.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

29.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

30.

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

Ward Jenkins

31.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

32.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

33.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

34.

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

Camus, Albert

35.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

36.

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

37.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

38.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

39.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

40.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

41.

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

42.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

43.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

48.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

49.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

50.

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