Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

- Miller, Henry

Best Quotes about Art

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

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

Woodberry, George E.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

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

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.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

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

Riding, Laura

10.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

11.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

12.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

14.

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

15.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

16.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

17.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

18.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

19.

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

20.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

21.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

22.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

23.

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

24.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

25.

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

26.

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

Updike, John

27.

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

28.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

29.

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

Holyfield, Evander

30.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

31.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

32.

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

Joyce, James

33.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

35.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

36.

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

Burroughs, William S.

37.

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

38.

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

Ovid

39.

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

Anderson, Judith

40.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

41.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

42.

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

Ruskin, John

43.

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.

44.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

45.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

46.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

47.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

48.

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

Sand, George

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

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

Cioran, E. M.