Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- G. K. Chesterton

Best Quotes about Art

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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

Mann, Horace

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

10.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

11.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

12.

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

Cioran, E. M.

13.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

15.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

16.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

18.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

19.

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

Varese, Edward

20.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

21.

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

22.

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

Kempis, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

25.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

26.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

27.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

28.

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

Zola, Emile

29.

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

30.

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

Burroughs, William S.

31.

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

32.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

33.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

34.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

35.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

36.

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

37.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

39.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

41.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

42.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

43.

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

Einstein, Albert

44.

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

West, Rebecca

45.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

47.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

48.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

49.

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

50.

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

Thurber, James