Motivational Quotes

Art

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

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

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

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

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

10.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

11.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

12.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

14.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

16.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

17.

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

18.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

19.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

20.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

21.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

25.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

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

Truman, Harry S

28.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

29.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

33.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

34.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

35.

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

36.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

37.

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

Edith Wharton

38.

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

Lowell, James Russell

39.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

40.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

41.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

42.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

43.

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

44.

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

Moses, Grandma

45.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

49.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

50.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.