Motivational Quotes

Art

All art is an imitation of nature.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Art

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

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

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

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

Eliot, T. S.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

10.

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

11.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

12.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

13.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

14.

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

Proust, Marcel

15.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

16.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

17.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

19.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

20.

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

21.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

22.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

23.

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

24.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

25.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

26.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

27.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

28.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

29.

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

Motherwell, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

William Baziotes

32.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

33.

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

34.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

35.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

36.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

37.

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

38.

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

39.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

40.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

42.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

43.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

44.

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

45.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

46.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

47.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

48.

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

Brown, John Mason

49.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

50.

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