Motivational Quotes

Art

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

- Schumann, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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.

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

Duke Ellington

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

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

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Holyfield, Evander

10.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

11.

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.

12.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

13.

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

14.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

15.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

16.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

17.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

18.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

19.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

20.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

21.

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

Motherwell, Robert

22.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

23.

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

24.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

27.

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

Chopra, Deepak

28.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

29.

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

Kennedy, John F.

30.

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

John F. Kennedy

31.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

32.

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

Eliot, T. S.

33.

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

34.

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

Wilson, Robert

35.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

36.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

37.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

38.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

39.

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

Keller, Helen

40.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

41.

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

42.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

43.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

44.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

45.

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

46.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

47.

What we play is life.