Motivational Quotes

Art

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

- Rosenberg, Harold

Best Quotes about Art

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

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

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

Walt Whitman

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

Murdoch, Iris

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

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

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

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

10.

Rosenberg, Harold

11.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

12.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

16.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

17.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

18.

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

19.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

20.

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

Cather, Willa

21.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

22.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

23.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

25.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

26.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

27.

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

28.

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

West, Rebecca

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

32.

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

33.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Frost, Robert

35.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

36.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

37.

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

Motherwell, 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.

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

Picasso, Pablo

40.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

41.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

42.

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

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

45.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

46.

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

47.

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

Einstein, Albert

48.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

49.

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

50.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb