Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Cioran, E. M.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

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

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

10.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

11.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

13.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

14.

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

Midler, Bette

15.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

16.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

17.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

18.

Love can heal a broken heart.

19.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

20.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

21.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

22.

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

23.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

24.

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

Wordsworth, William

25.

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

26.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

27.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

28.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

29.

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

Zola, Emile

30.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

31.

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

Motherwell, Robert

32.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

34.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

36.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

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 as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

39.

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

40.

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

Paz, Octavio

41.

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

Kooning, Willem De

42.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

43.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

44.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

47.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

48.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

49.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

50.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von