Motivational Quotes

Art

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Best Quotes about Art

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

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

Brown, John Mason

11.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

12.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

14.

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

Eliot, T. S.

15.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

22.

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

23.

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

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.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

26.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

27.

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

28.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

29.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

30.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

31.

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

32.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

33.

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.

34.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

35.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

36.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

37.

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

38.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

39.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

40.

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

41.

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

Kennedy, John F.

42.

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

Ovid

43.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

44.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

45.

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

Bible

46.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

47.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

48.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

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

50.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean