Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Roosevelt, Theodore

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

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

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

12.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

13.

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

14.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

16.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

17.

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

Peri, Gabriel

18.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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.

21.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

22.

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

23.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

24.

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

25.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

26.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

27.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

28.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

30.

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

31.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

33.

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

34.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

35.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

36.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

37.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

38.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

39.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

40.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Shakespeare, William

44.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

45.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

46.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

47.

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

48.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

49.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

50.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John