Motivational Quotes

Art

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

Midler, Bette

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

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

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

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

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

10.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

11.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

12.

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

Joyce, James

13.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

14.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

15.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

16.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

17.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

18.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

19.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

20.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

21.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

22.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

23.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

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

25.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

26.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

27.

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

28.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

29.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

30.

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

Gutzkow

31.

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

Mann, Horace

32.

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

33.

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

Cather, Willa

34.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

36.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Anderson, Bill

40.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

41.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

42.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

43.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

44.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

45.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

46.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

47.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

49.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

50.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri