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

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

10.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

11.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

12.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

13.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

14.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

15.

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

16.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

17.

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

David Cronenberg

18.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

19.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

20.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

21.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

22.

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

Keller, Helen

23.

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

Al Capp

24.

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

25.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

26.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

27.

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

28.

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

Ciardi, John

29.

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

Truman, Harry S

30.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

31.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

33.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

34.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

35.

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

36.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

37.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

38.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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.

40.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

41.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

42.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

43.

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

44.

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

45.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

46.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

47.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

48.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.