Motivational Quotes

Art

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

- Luther, Martin

Best Quotes about Art

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

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

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

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

Henry Ward Beecher

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

Truman, Harry S

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.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

10.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

12.

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

Wordsworth, William

13.

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

Driscoll, Louise

14.

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

Duke Ellington

15.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

16.

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

17.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

18.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

19.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

20.

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

21.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

22.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

23.

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

24.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

26.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

27.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

28.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

29.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

30.

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

31.

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

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.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

34.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

35.

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)

36.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

37.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

38.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

39.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

41.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

42.

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

43.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Ruckett

47.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.