Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

Paglia, Camille

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

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

Gutzkow

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

10.

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

Anderson, Judith

11.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

12.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

13.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Ovid

19.

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

20.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

21.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

22.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

23.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

24.

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

25.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

26.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

27.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

28.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

29.

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

30.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

31.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

32.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

Schumann, Robert

34.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

35.

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

Ciardi, John

36.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

37.

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

Parker, Dorothy

38.

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

Mailer, Norman

39.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

40.

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

Novalis

41.

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

Yu Cao

42.

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

Kooning, Willem De

43.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

44.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

45.

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

46.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

47.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John