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

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

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

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

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

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

10.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

11.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

12.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

13.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

14.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

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

16.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

17.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

18.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

19.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

20.

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

21.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

22.

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

23.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

25.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

26.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

27.

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

Churchill, Winston

28.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

29.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

30.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

31.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

32.

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

Sand, George

33.

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

Wilson, Robert

34.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

35.

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

36.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

37.

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

38.

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

Gide, Andre

39.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

40.

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

41.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

42.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

44.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

45.

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

Piet Mondrian

46.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

47.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

48.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

49.

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

Keller, Helen

50.

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

Eliot, T. S.