Motivational Quotes

Art

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

- Saint-Victor, Richard of

Best Quotes about Art

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

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

Frost, Robert

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

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

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.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

10.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

11.

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

Wilson, Robert

12.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

13.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

14.

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

15.

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

Walt Whitman

16.

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

Cioran, E. M.

17.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

18.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

19.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

20.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

21.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

22.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

23.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

24.

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

25.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

26.

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

27.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

28.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

30.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

31.

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

32.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

33.

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

Duke Ellington

34.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

35.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

36.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

37.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

38.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

39.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

40.

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

41.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

42.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

43.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

44.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

45.

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

46.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

47.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

48.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

49.

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

50.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen