Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Howe, Nathaniel

Best Quotes about Art

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

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

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

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)

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

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

Proverb, Chinese

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

10.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

11.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

12.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

13.

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

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

16.

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

17.

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

Varese, Edward

18.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

19.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

20.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

21.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

22.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

23.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

24.

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

25.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

26.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

27.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

28.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

29.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

33.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

34.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

35.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

36.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

37.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

38.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

39.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

40.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

41.

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

42.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

43.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

44.

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

Connolly, Cyril

45.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.