Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Elizabeth Bowen

Best Quotes about Art

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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

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

Proust, Marcel

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

Pablo Picasso

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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

Edith Wharton

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

13.

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

14.

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

Morris, William

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

19.

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

Chopra, Deepak

20.

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

Weil, Simone

21.

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

22.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

23.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

24.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

Parker, Dorothy

26.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

27.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

28.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

29.

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

30.

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

31.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

32.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

33.

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

34.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

35.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

36.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

37.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

38.

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

39.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

40.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

41.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

42.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

44.

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

45.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

46.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

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

M. C. Richards

49.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

50.

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