Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Parker, Dorothy

Best Quotes about Art

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

Shakespeare, William

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

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

Cather, Willa

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Piero Milani

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Gide, Andre

13.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

14.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

15.

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.

16.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

20.

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

21.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

22.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

23.

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

24.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

25.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

26.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

27.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

28.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

29.

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

Ovid

30.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

31.

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

Woodberry, George E.

32.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

33.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

34.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

35.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

36.

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

37.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

38.

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

39.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

44.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

48.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

49.

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

50.

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