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

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

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

Proverb, Chinese

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

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

Proverb

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

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

Ben Shahn

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

10.

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

11.

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

Motherwell, Robert

12.

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

13.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

14.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

15.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

16.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

18.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

19.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

20.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

21.

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

Simonides

22.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

23.

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

24.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

25.

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

26.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

27.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

28.

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

M. C. Richards

29.

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

30.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

31.

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

Pascal, Blaise

32.

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

33.

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

G. K. Chesterton

34.

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

Walt Whitman

35.

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

36.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

37.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

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.

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

40.

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

41.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

42.

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

43.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

44.

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

45.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

47.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.