Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist was first an amateur.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Best Quotes about Art

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Camus, Albert

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

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.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Elizabeth Bowen

10.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

17.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

18.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

19.

Love can heal a broken heart.

20.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

24.

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

25.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

26.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

30.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

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

33.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

34.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

35.

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

36.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Walt Whitman

38.

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

39.

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

William Baziotes

40.

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

41.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

42.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

45.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

46.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

47.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

48.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

49.

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

Camus, Albert

50.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham