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

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

Ionesco, Eugene

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

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

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

10.

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.

11.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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.

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

Piero Milani

14.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

16.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

17.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

20.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

21.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

22.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

23.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

24.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

25.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

26.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

27.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

28.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

29.

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

30.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

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.

35.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

36.

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

Mann, Horace

37.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

38.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

39.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

40.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

41.

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

Klee, Paul

42.

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

43.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Cioran, E. M.

45.

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

46.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

50.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese