Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is a form of catharsis.

- Parker, Dorothy

Best Quotes about Art

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

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

Proverb

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

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.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

10.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

11.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

12.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

13.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

14.

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

15.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

16.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

17.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

18.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

19.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

20.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

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

22.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

23.

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

24.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

25.

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

G. K. Chesterton

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

29.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

30.

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.

31.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

32.

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

Sand, George

33.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

34.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

36.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

37.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

38.

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

39.

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

Gide, Andre

40.

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

41.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

42.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

43.

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

44.

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

Churchill, Winston

45.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

46.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

47.

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

48.

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

Ovid

49.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

50.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline