Motivational Quotes

Art

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

- Melville, Herman

Best Quotes about Art

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

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

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

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

Proverb

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

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

Picasso, Pablo

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

10.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

11.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

17.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

18.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

19.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

20.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

21.

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

22.

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

23.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

24.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

25.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

26.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

27.

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

Sand, George

28.

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

29.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

30.

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

31.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

32.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

33.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

34.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

36.

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

37.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

38.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

39.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

40.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

41.

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

42.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

43.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

44.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

45.

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

46.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

47.

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

48.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

49.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

50.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De