Motivational Quotes

Art

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Art

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

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

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

Schumann, Robert

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

Joyce, James

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

10.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

11.

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

12.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

13.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

14.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

15.

Eliot, T. S.

16.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

17.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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 distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

21.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

22.

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

23.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

24.

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

25.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

26.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

27.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

29.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

30.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

31.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

32.

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

Sand, George

33.

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

Weil, Simone

34.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

35.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

36.

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

Frost, Robert

37.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

38.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

42.

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

Varese, Edward

43.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

44.

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

45.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

46.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

47.

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

Mailer, Norman

48.

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

49.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

50.

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