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

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

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

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

10.

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

11.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

12.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Eugene Delacroix

14.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

15.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

16.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

17.

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

18.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

19.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

20.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

22.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

26.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

27.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

28.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

29.

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

30.

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

Driscoll, Louise

31.

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

32.

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

Holyfield, Evander

33.

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

34.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

35.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

36.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

40.

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

41.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

45.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

46.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

47.

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