Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Riding, Laura

Best Quotes about Art

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.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

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

Howe, Nathaniel

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

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

Picasso, Pablo

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

10.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

11.

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

Churchill, Winston

12.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

13.

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

Murdoch, Iris

14.

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

15.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

16.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

17.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

18.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

19.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

26.

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

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

29.

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

Paz, Octavio

30.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

34.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

35.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

37.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

38.

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

39.

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

Schumann, Robert

40.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

41.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

43.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

Melville, Herman

45.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

46.

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

Einstein, Albert

47.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

Peri, Gabriel

49.

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

50.

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.