Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

John F. Kennedy

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

Brown, John Mason

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

10.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

11.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

13.

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

Mailer, Norman

14.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

15.

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

Bible

16.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

17.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

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.

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

20.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

22.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

24.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

25.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

26.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

27.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

28.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

29.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

30.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

31.

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

Driscoll, Louise

32.

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

33.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

34.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

35.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

36.

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

Simonides

37.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

38.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

39.

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

Proverb

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Thurber, James

42.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

43.

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

44.

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

Kael, Pauline

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

48.

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

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

50.

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

Yu Cao