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

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

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

Mailer, Norman

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

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

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

10.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

11.

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

Melville, Herman

12.

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

13.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

14.

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.

15.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

16.

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

17.

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

Chopra, Deepak

18.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

20.

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

Riding, Laura

21.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

22.

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

23.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

25.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

26.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

27.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

28.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

29.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

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.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

32.

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

33.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

34.

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

35.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

36.

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

37.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

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

39.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

40.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

41.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

42.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

43.

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

44.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

45.

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

46.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

47.

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

48.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

49.

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

50.

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