Motivational Quotes

Art

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

- Hare, David

Best Quotes about Art

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

13.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

14.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

15.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

16.

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

17.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

18.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

22.

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

23.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

24.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

25.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

26.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

27.

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

Ambrose Bierce

28.

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

29.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

Parker, Dorothy

32.

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

33.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

34.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

35.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

36.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

37.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

38.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

39.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

40.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

41.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

42.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

43.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

44.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

45.

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

46.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

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

Camus, Albert

48.

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

Shakespeare, William

49.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.