Motivational Quotes

Art

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Art

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

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

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

Ginsberg, Allen

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

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

Bellow, Saul

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

Brown, John Mason

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

10.

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

11.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Simonides

16.

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

Weil, Simone

17.

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

18.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

19.

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

Eugene Delacroix

20.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

21.

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

22.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

23.

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

Ruckett

24.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

25.

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

26.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

27.

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

28.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

29.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

30.

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

Ward Jenkins

31.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

32.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

33.

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

34.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

35.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

38.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

39.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

40.

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

Edith Wharton

41.

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

42.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Wilson, Robert

46.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Andre Gide

50.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes