Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

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

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

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.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

10.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

11.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

12.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

13.

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)

14.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

15.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

16.

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

Joyce, James

17.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

18.

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

19.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

20.

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

Ovid

21.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

22.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

23.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

24.

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

Kempis, Thomas

25.

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

26.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

27.

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

28.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

29.

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.

30.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

31.

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

Melville, Herman

32.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

33.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

34.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

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

36.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

37.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

38.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

39.

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

Isak Dineson

40.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

41.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

42.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

43.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

44.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

45.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

46.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

47.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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