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

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

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

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

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

Gide, Andre

10.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

11.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

12.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

16.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

18.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

19.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

20.

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

Burroughs, William S.

21.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

22.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

23.

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

Einstein, Albert

24.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

25.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

26.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

28.

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

29.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

30.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

31.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

32.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

33.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

34.

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

35.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

36.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

37.

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

Schumann, Robert

38.

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

39.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

40.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

41.

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

Edith Wharton

42.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

43.

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

44.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

45.

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

46.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

47.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.