Motivational Quotes

Art

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Art

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

10.

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

11.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

12.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

13.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

14.

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

15.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

18.

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

Duke Ellington

19.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

20.

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

21.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

22.

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

23.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

24.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

25.

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

Bible

26.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

27.

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

David Cronenberg

28.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

29.

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

30.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

31.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

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

Weil, Simone

34.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

35.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

36.

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

37.

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

Al Capp

38.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

39.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

40.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

41.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

42.

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

Simonides

43.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

44.

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

Proverb

45.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

46.

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

47.

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

Morris, William

48.

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)

49.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

50.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.