Motivational Quotes

Art

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Art

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

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

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

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

Dubuffet, Jean

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

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

Shakespeare, William

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

10.

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

11.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

12.

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

Gide, Andre

13.

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

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.

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

16.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

17.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

18.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

19.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

20.

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

Schumann, Robert

21.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

22.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

23.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

24.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

25.

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

Picasso, Pablo

26.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

27.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

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

29.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

30.

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

Eliot, T. S.

31.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

32.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

33.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

34.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

35.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

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 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

39.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

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

Shakespeare, William

41.

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

42.

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

John F. Kennedy

43.

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

44.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

48.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

49.

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

50.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul