Motivational Quotes

Art

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

- Edith Wharton

Best Quotes about Art

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

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

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Parker, Dorothy

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

10.

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

11.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

12.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

14.

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

Berle, Adolf

15.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

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

17.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

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

Gide, Andre

19.

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

20.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

21.

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

Proust, Marcel

22.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

23.

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

Holyfield, Evander

24.

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

25.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

26.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

27.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

28.

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

Blackie, Professor

29.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

30.

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

31.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

32.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

33.

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.

34.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

39.

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

40.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

41.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

42.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

43.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

45.

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

46.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

47.

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

Sand, George

48.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

49.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

50.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish