Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Woodberry, George E.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

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

Kennedy, John F.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

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

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

10.

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

Keller, Helen

11.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

12.

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

13.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

14.

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

15.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

16.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

17.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

18.

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

19.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

20.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

21.

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

22.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

23.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

24.

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

George Tooker

25.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

26.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

27.

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

28.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

29.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

30.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

31.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

32.

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

Jacob, Max

33.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

34.

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

Eugene Delacroix

35.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

36.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

37.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

38.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

39.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

40.

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

41.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

42.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

43.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

45.

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

46.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

47.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

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.

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

Proverb, Chinese

50.

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