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

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Conrad, Joseph

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

10.

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

Gill, Eric

11.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

13.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

14.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

16.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

17.

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

18.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

19.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

20.

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

Ovid

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

24.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

25.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

26.

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

Melville, Herman

27.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

28.

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

Moses, Grandma

29.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

30.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

32.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

33.

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

34.

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

Chopra, Deepak

35.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

37.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

38.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

39.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

40.

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

41.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

42.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

43.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

44.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

45.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

46.

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

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

49.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

50.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques