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 heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

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.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

10.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

11.

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

Kael, Pauline

12.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

13.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

14.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

15.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

16.

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

17.

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

Sand, George

18.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

19.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

20.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

21.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

22.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

24.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

25.

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

Anderson, Bill

26.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

27.

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

G. K. Chesterton

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

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.

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

Burroughs, William S.

32.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

33.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

35.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

36.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

37.

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

38.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

39.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

43.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

46.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

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

48.

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

Klee, Paul

49.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

50.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb