Motivational Quotes

Art

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

- Isak Dineson

Best Quotes about Art

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

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

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

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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.

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

Morris, William

10.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

11.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

12.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

14.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

15.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

16.

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

17.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

21.

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

22.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

23.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

24.

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

25.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

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

Cather, Willa

27.

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

Kooning, Willem De

28.

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

29.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

30.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

34.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

38.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

42.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

43.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

44.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

45.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

46.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

49.

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

50.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.