Motivational Quotes

Art

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

- Ginsberg, Allen

Best Quotes about Art

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

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

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

10.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

11.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

12.

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

13.

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

Al Capp

14.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

15.

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

Burroughs, William S.

16.

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

17.

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

Driscoll, Louise

18.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

19.

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

Klee, Paul

20.

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

21.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

22.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

23.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

24.

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

Chopra, Deepak

25.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

26.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

27.

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

Proverb, Chinese

28.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

29.

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.

30.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

31.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

32.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

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.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

35.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

36.

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

37.

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

38.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

39.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

40.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

41.

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

Eugene Delacroix

42.

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

Holyfield, Evander

43.

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

Capp, Al

44.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

45.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

46.

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

Walt Whitman

47.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

48.

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

David Cronenberg

49.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

50.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen