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

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

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

Midler, Bette

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

John F. Kennedy

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

Zola, Emile

10.

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

11.

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

13.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

14.

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

15.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

16.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

17.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

19.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

20.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

21.

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

William Baziotes

22.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

23.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

24.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

25.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

26.

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

Sand, George

27.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

28.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

29.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

30.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

31.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

Simonides

34.

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

35.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

36.

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

37.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

38.

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

Kooning, Willem De

39.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

40.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

41.

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

42.

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

Bible

43.

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

44.

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

Proust, Marcel