Motivational Quotes

Art

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

- Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

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

Frye, Northrop

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

10.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

11.

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

12.

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

Ovid

13.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

14.

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

15.

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

Jeff Melvoin

16.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

17.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

18.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

19.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

20.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

21.

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

David Cronenberg

22.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

23.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

24.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

25.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

26.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

31.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

35.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

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

Gill, Eric

39.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

40.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

41.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

42.

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

Andre Gide

43.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

46.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

50.

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