Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

- Grass, Gunther

Best Quotes about Art

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

Brown, John Mason

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

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

Ben Shahn

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Bellow, Saul

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

10.

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

11.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

12.

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

13.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

14.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

15.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

16.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

17.

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

Kennedy, John F.

18.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

19.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

20.

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

21.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

22.

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

Andre Gide

23.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

24.

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

25.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

26.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

29.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

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

31.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

32.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

33.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

34.

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

35.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

Ovid

37.

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

John F. Kennedy

38.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

39.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Edith Wharton

50.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth