Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Conrad, Joseph

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

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

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

Henry Ward Beecher

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

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

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

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

10.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

11.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

12.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

14.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

15.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

17.

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

Updike, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

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)

22.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

23.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

24.

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

Parker, Theodore

25.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

26.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

27.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

28.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

29.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

30.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

31.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

32.

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

33.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

35.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

36.

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

37.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

38.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

39.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

40.

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.

41.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

42.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

43.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

44.

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

45.

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

Truman, Harry S

46.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

47.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

48.

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

Frye, Northrop

49.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

50.

Love can heal a broken heart.