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

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

Proust, Marcel

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

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

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

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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

10.

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

11.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

12.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

13.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

14.

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

15.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

16.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

17.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

18.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

19.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

20.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

21.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

22.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

23.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

24.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Motherwell, Robert

28.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

29.

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

Novalis

30.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

31.

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

32.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

35.

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

36.

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

Camus, Albert

37.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

38.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

41.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

42.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

44.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

45.

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.

46.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

47.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

48.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

49.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

50.

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