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

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.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

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

Wolfe, Thomas

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

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

Peri, Gabriel

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

Cather, Willa

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

Love can heal a broken heart.

11.

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.

12.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

14.

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

Connolly, Cyril

15.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

16.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

17.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

18.

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

Edith Wharton

19.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

20.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

21.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

22.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

23.

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

24.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

25.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

27.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

28.

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

29.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

30.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

31.

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

32.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

33.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

34.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

35.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

36.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

37.

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

38.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

39.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

41.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

42.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

43.

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

44.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

45.

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

46.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

47.

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

Mann, Horace

48.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

49.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

50.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay