Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Simonides

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.

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

Shakespeare, William

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

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

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

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

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

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

Frye, Northrop

10.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

11.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

12.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

13.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

14.

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

15.

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

16.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

17.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

18.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

19.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

20.

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

21.

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

Picasso, Pablo

22.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

28.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

29.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

30.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

33.

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

34.

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

William Baziotes

35.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

36.

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

37.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

38.

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

39.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

43.

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

44.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

45.

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

46.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

47.

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

48.

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

Eliot, T. S.

49.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

50.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead