Motivational Quotes

Art

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

- Elizabeth Aston

Best Quotes about Art

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

Mailer, Norman

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

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.

10.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

11.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

12.

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

13.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

14.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

15.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

16.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

17.

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

18.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

19.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

20.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

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

23.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

24.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

26.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

28.

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

Ambrose Bierce

29.

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

30.

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

31.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

32.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

33.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

34.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

35.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

37.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

38.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

39.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

40.

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

Ruckett

41.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

42.

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.

43.

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

Gide, Andre

44.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

45.

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

46.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

47.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

48.

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

49.

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

Truman, Harry S

50.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo