Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

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

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

10.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

11.

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

Simonides

12.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

13.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

14.

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

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

17.

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

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.

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

20.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

21.

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

22.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

23.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

24.

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

Shakespeare, William

25.

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

M. C. Richards

26.

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

27.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

28.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

29.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

30.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

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.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Edith Wharton

37.

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

38.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

39.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

40.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

41.

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

Camus, Albert

42.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

43.

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

Updike, John

44.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Conrad, Joseph

46.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

47.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

48.

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

Connolly, Cyril

49.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

50.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James