Motivational Quotes

Art

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

- Kempis, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

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.

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

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

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

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

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

10.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

11.

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

12.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

14.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

15.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

16.

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

Cioran, E. M.

17.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

18.

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

Woodberry, George E.

19.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

20.

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

Frye, Northrop

21.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

22.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

26.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

27.

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

28.

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

Kooning, Willem De

29.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

30.

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

31.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

32.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

33.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

34.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

35.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

36.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

38.

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

Picasso, Pablo

39.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

43.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

44.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

45.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

46.

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

47.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

48.

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

49.

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

Duke Ellington

50.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador