Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Keller, Helen

Best Quotes about Art

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

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

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

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

10.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

13.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

15.

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

16.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

17.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

18.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

19.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

20.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

21.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

22.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

Einstein, Albert

24.

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

Varese, Edward

25.

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

Weil, Simone

26.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

27.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

29.

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

30.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

31.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

32.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

33.

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

Morris, William

34.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

35.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

36.

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

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

Ciardi, John

39.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

40.

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

41.

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

42.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

43.

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

Cather, Willa

44.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

45.

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

Andre Gide

46.

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

47.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

48.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

49.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

50.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell