Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Churchill, Winston

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

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

10.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

11.

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

12.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

13.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

14.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

15.

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

16.

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

Proverb, Chinese

17.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

18.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

19.

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

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

22.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

24.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

25.

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

Gill, Eric

26.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

27.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

28.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

29.

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

Anderson, Bill

30.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

31.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

32.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

33.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

34.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

35.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

39.

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

Gide, Andre

40.

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

41.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

42.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

43.

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

Holyfield, Evander

44.

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

Wilson, Robert

45.

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

46.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

48.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

49.

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

Parker, Dorothy