Motivational Quotes

Art

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

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

Morris, William

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

10.

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

11.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

14.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

15.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

16.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

17.

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

18.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

19.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

20.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

21.

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

22.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

23.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

24.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

25.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

27.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

30.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

31.

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

32.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

33.

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

34.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

35.

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

Cioran, E. M.

36.

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

Churchill, Winston

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

42.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

43.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

48.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

49.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

50.

I shut my eyes in order to see.