Motivational Quotes

Art

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

- Mann, Horace

Best Quotes about Art

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

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

Cassady, Neal

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Piet Mondrian

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

10.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

11.

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

Updike, John

12.

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

13.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

14.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

15.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

17.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

18.

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

Jeff Melvoin

19.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

20.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

21.

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

Ruskin, John

22.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

23.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

24.

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

Gill, Eric

25.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

26.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

27.

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

Camus, Albert

28.

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

Parker, Theodore

29.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

30.

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

31.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

32.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

33.

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

Murdoch, Iris

34.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

35.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

36.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

37.

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

38.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

41.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

42.

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

43.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

44.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

45.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

47.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

48.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

50.

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

Ruckett