Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

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

Jeff Melvoin

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

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

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

10.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

11.

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

12.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

13.

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

14.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

15.

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

Cassady, Neal

16.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

17.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

18.

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

19.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

20.

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

Cioran, E. M.

21.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

22.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

23.

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

24.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

25.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

26.

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

27.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

28.

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

David Cronenberg

29.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

30.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

31.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Truman, Harry S

34.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

35.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

36.

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

Pablo Picasso

37.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

38.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

40.

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

41.

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

Piero Milani

42.

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

43.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

44.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

45.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

46.

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

Anderson, Judith

47.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

48.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

49.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

50.

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