Motivational Quotes

Art

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

- Novalis

Best Quotes about Art

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

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

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

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

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

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

Camus, Albert

10.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

11.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

16.

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

Churchill, Winston

17.

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

Ovid

18.

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.

19.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

20.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

21.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

22.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

23.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

24.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

25.

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

Yu Cao

26.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

27.

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

John F. Kennedy

28.

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

Isak Dineson

29.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

30.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

31.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

32.

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

33.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

34.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

35.

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.

36.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

39.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

42.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

43.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

44.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

45.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

46.

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

Jackson Pollock

47.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

48.

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

49.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo