Motivational Quotes

Art

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

- Gutzkow

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ginsberg, Allen

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

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

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

10.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

11.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

12.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

13.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

14.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

15.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

16.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

17.

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

Ambrose Bierce

18.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

19.

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

20.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

21.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

Cather, Willa

24.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

25.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

26.

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

27.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

28.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

29.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

30.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

31.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

32.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

33.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

35.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

36.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

37.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

38.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

39.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

40.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

41.

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

Brown, John Mason

42.

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

Joyce, James

43.

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

Mann, Horace

44.

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

45.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

46.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

47.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

48.

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

49.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

50.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel