Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- David Cronenberg

Best Quotes about Art

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Burroughs, William S.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

Dubuffet, Jean

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

Frost, Robert

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

10.

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

11.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

13.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

14.

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

Picasso, Pablo

15.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

16.

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

17.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

18.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

19.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

20.

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

21.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

22.

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

Weil, Simone

23.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

24.

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)

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

29.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

30.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

31.

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

32.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

33.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

34.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

35.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

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

Camus, Albert

37.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

38.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

39.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

40.

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

Anderson, Bill

41.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

42.

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

43.

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

Mailer, Norman

44.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

45.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

46.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.