Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

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

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

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

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

10.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

11.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

12.

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

13.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

14.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

15.

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

Simonides

16.

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

17.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

18.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

19.

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

Woodberry, George E.

20.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

21.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

22.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

24.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

25.

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

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

27.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

28.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

29.

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

30.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

31.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

32.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

33.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

34.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

35.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

36.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

37.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

38.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

39.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

40.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

41.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

44.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

45.

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

46.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

47.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo