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

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Frost, Robert

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

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

Henry Ward Beecher

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

Simonides

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

10.

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

11.

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

Anderson, Judith

12.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

13.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

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 the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

16.

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

17.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

18.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

19.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

20.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

21.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

22.

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

Ovid

23.

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

24.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

25.

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

Ciardi, John

26.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

27.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

28.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

29.

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

30.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

31.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

33.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

34.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

36.

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

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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.

38.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

39.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

40.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

41.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

42.

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

Wordsworth, William

43.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

44.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

45.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

46.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

47.

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

48.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

49.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

50.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur