Motivational Quotes

Art

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

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

Ionesco, Eugene

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

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

10.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

11.

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.

12.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

13.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

14.

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

Proverb

15.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

16.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

17.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

18.

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

Murdoch, Iris

19.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

20.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

21.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

22.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

23.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

28.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

29.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

30.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

31.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

32.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

33.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

34.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

35.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

36.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

37.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

39.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

40.

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

41.

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

Motherwell, Robert

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.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Paz, Octavio

47.

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

48.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

49.

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

50.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van