Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Walt Whitman

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

Sand, George

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

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

11.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

12.

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

Proverb

13.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

14.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

15.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

16.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

17.

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

18.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

19.

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

Al Capp

20.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

21.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

22.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

23.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Weil, Simone

27.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

28.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

29.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

30.

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

Proverb, Chinese

31.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

32.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

33.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

35.

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

Zola, Emile

36.

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

Eliot, T. S.

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

39.

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

Bellow, Saul

40.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

41.

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

Novalis

42.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

43.

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

George Tooker

44.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

45.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

46.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

47.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

48.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

49.

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

50.

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