Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

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

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

10.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

11.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

12.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

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.

14.

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

Simonides

15.

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

16.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

17.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

18.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

19.

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

Burroughs, William S.

20.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

21.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

22.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

23.

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

Camus, Albert

24.

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

25.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

26.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

28.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

29.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

30.

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

31.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

32.

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

33.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

34.

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

35.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

36.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

37.

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

Berle, Adolf

38.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

39.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

40.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

41.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

42.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

43.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

44.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

45.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

46.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

47.

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

48.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

49.

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

50.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders