Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Kennedy, John F.

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Henry Ward Beecher

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.

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

Keller, Helen

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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.

10.

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

Kooning, Willem De

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

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

Conrad, Joseph

17.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

19.

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

20.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

21.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

22.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

23.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

24.

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

25.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

26.

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

27.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

28.

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

29.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

30.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

31.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

32.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

33.

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

34.

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

35.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

36.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

37.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

39.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

40.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

41.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

42.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

43.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

44.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

45.

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

46.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

47.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

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

49.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

50.

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

Bangs, Lester