Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

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.

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

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

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

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

David Cronenberg

10.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

11.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

12.

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

13.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

14.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

15.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

16.

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

17.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

18.

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

19.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

20.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

21.

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

22.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

23.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

24.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

25.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

26.

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

Eliot, T. S.

27.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

29.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

30.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

32.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

33.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

34.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

35.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

36.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

40.

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

41.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

42.

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

Ward Jenkins

43.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

44.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

45.

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

46.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

47.

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

48.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

49.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.