Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

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

Midler, Bette

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

Frost, Robert

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

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

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

Parker, Theodore

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

10.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

11.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

16.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

17.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

18.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

19.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

20.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

21.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

22.

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

Duke Ellington

23.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

24.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

25.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

26.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

27.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Mann, Horace

29.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

30.

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

Joyce, James

31.

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

Berle, Adolf

32.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

33.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

34.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

38.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

39.

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

40.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

41.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

42.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

43.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

44.

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

Weil, Simone

45.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

46.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

47.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

49.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

50.

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