Motivational Quotes

Art

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

- Shaw, George Bernard

Best Quotes about Art

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

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

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

10.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

12.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

13.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

14.

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

15.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

19.

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.

20.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

21.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

22.

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

23.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

24.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

25.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

26.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

28.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

30.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

31.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

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

33.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

34.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

35.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

36.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

37.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

38.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

40.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

41.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

43.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

44.

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

45.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

46.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn