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

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Jacob, Max

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

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

Peri, Gabriel

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

Edith Wharton

10.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

11.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

12.

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

Conrad, Joseph

13.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

14.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

15.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

16.

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

Midler, Bette

17.

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

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

20.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

21.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

22.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

23.

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

24.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

25.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

26.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

27.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

28.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

29.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

Kennedy, John F.

32.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

33.

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

Ovid

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

36.

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

Berle, Adolf

37.

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

38.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

39.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

43.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

45.

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

46.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

48.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

49.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

50.

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