Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

Klee, Paul

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

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

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

10.

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

David Cronenberg

11.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

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

Jackson Pollock

13.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

14.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

15.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

16.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

17.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

18.

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

19.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

20.

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

21.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

22.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

23.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

24.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

25.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

26.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

27.

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

28.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

29.

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

30.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

31.

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

32.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

33.

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

34.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

35.

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

36.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

37.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

38.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

39.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

40.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

41.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

42.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

43.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

44.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

45.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

46.

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

Al Capp

47.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

48.

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

Weil, Simone

49.

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

50.

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