Motivational Quotes

Art

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Art

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

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

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

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

10.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

11.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

15.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

16.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

22.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

23.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

24.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

25.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

26.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

27.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Driscoll, Louise

31.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

32.

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

33.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

34.

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

35.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

36.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

37.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

38.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

42.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

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

Klee, Paul

44.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

45.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

46.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

47.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

48.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

49.

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

Riding, Laura

50.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham