Motivational Quotes

Art

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

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

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

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

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

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

10.

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

11.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

12.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

13.

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

Truman, Harry S

14.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

15.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

Picasso, Pablo

17.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

21.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

22.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

23.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

25.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Gill, Eric

29.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

30.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

31.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

32.

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

33.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

34.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

35.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

36.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

37.

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

Updike, John

38.

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

39.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

40.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

41.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

42.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

43.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

44.

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

45.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

46.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

47.

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

48.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

49.

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

50.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham