Motivational Quotes

Art

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

- Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

John F. Kennedy

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

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

Motherwell, Robert

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Novalis

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Camus, Albert

13.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

17.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

18.

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

Picasso, Pablo

19.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

20.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

21.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

22.

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

23.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

24.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

25.

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

26.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

27.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

28.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

33.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

34.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

35.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

36.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

37.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

38.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

39.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

40.

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

Cioran, E. M.

41.

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

Duke Ellington

42.

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.

43.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

44.

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

Churchill, Winston

45.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

46.

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

Burroughs, William S.

47.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin