Motivational Quotes

Art

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

- Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Brown, John Mason

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

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

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

10.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

11.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

12.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

13.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

14.

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

15.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

16.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

17.

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

18.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

19.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

20.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

21.

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

22.

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

Sand, George

23.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

24.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

25.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

26.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

27.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

36.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

37.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

38.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

42.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

43.

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

44.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

45.

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

West, Rebecca

46.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

47.

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

48.

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

Gill, Eric

49.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

50.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn