Motivational Quotes

Art

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

- Frye, Northrop

Best Quotes about Art

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

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

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

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

Sand, George

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

11.

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

Cather, Willa

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.

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

Andre Gide

14.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

15.

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

16.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

17.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

18.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

20.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

21.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

22.

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

23.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

24.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

28.

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.

29.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

30.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

31.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

32.

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

33.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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.

35.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

36.

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

37.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

38.

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

39.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

40.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

41.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

42.

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

Camus, Albert

43.

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

44.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

46.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

47.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

48.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

49.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

50.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon