Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

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

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

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

Joyce, James

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

Miguel de Cervantes

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

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.

10.

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

Proverb, Chinese

11.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

12.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

13.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

14.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

15.

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.

16.

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

G. K. Chesterton

17.

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

Frost, Robert

18.

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

19.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Morris, William

23.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

24.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

25.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

26.

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

27.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

28.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

32.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

33.

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

34.

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

Proverb

35.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

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

Weil, Simone

37.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

38.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

39.

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

Al Capp

40.

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

41.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

42.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

43.

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

44.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

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

Jackson Pollock

46.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

47.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

48.

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

Schumann, Robert

49.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

50.

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