Motivational Quotes

Art

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

- Havel, Vaclav

Best Quotes about Art

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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

Ginsberg, Allen

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

Rosenberg, Harold

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

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

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

10.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

11.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

12.

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.

13.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

14.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

15.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

17.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

18.

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

19.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

20.

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

21.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

22.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

23.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

24.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

25.

Havel, Vaclav

26.

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

Brown, John Mason

27.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

28.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

29.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

30.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

31.

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

32.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

33.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

34.

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

35.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

36.

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

Mailer, Norman

37.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

38.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

39.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

40.

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

41.

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

Weil, Simone

42.

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

43.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

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

45.

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

Proverb

46.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

47.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

48.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

49.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

50.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.