Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

Mailer, Norman

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

10.

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

11.

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

Woodberry, George E.

12.

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

13.

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

Wilson, Robert

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

17.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

18.

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

19.

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

Eugene Delacroix

20.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

21.

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

Yu Cao

22.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

23.

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

24.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

25.

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

26.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

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

28.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

29.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

30.

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

Bible

31.

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

32.

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

Simonides

33.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

34.

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

Parker, Dorothy

35.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

36.

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

Sand, George

37.

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

38.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

39.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

41.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

42.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

43.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

44.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

45.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

46.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

47.

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.

48.

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

David Cronenberg

49.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

50.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von