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

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

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.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

10.

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

Parker, Dorothy

11.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

12.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

13.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

14.

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

15.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

16.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

17.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

21.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

22.

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

Mailer, Norman

23.

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

24.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

25.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

26.

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

27.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

28.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

29.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

30.

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

33.

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

Kennedy, John F.

34.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Peri, Gabriel

38.

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

39.

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

David Cronenberg

40.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

41.

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

Sand, George

42.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

43.

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

Weil, Simone

44.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

45.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

46.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

47.

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

48.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

49.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

50.

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