Motivational Quotes

Art

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

- Francis De Sales, St.

Best Quotes about Art

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

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

12.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

13.

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

14.

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

Novalis

15.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

Proverb

17.

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.

18.

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

Paz, Octavio

19.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

20.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

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

22.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

23.

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

Varese, Edward

24.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

25.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

26.

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

27.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

28.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

30.

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

31.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

32.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

33.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

34.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

36.

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

37.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

42.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

43.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

44.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

45.

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

Sand, George

46.

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

47.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

48.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

49.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

50.

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