Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- G. K. Chesterton

Best Quotes about Art

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

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

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

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

Andre Gide

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Wilson, Robert

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

10.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

11.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

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

13.

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

Proust, Marcel

14.

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

Klee, Paul

15.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

16.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

17.

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

18.

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

Zola, Emile

19.

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.

20.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

21.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

22.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

23.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

24.

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

Paz, Octavio

25.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

26.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

27.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

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

29.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

30.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

31.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

33.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

34.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

35.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

36.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

37.

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

38.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

39.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

40.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

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

Brown, John Mason

42.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

43.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

44.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

45.

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

Cioran, E. M.

46.

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

George Tooker

47.

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

G. K. Chesterton

48.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

49.

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

50.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean