Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Frye, Northrop

Best Quotes about Art

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

Mann, Horace

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

Howe, Nathaniel

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Frye, Northrop

10.

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

Gill, Eric

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

13.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

14.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

15.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

16.

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

Eliot, T. S.

17.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

18.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

19.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

20.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

21.

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

Sand, George

22.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

23.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

24.

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

Shakespeare, William

25.

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

26.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

28.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

29.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

30.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

31.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

32.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

33.

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

Conrad, Joseph

34.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

35.

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

36.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

37.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

38.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

39.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

41.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

42.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

43.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

45.

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

George Tooker

46.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

47.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

48.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

49.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

50.

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