Motivational Quotes

Art

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

- Proverb, Danish

Best Quotes about Art

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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.

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

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

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

16.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

17.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

19.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

20.

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

Melville, Herman

21.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

22.

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

23.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

24.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

25.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

26.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

27.

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

Keller, Helen

28.

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.

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

33.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

34.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

35.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

36.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

37.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

38.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

39.

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

40.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

41.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

42.

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

Gide, Andre

43.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

44.

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

45.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

47.

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

Mailer, Norman

48.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.