Motivational Quotes

Art

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

- Sontag, Susan

Best Quotes about Art

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

Zola, Emile

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

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

Jackson Pollock

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

10.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

11.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

12.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

13.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

16.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

17.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

18.

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

Truman, Harry S

19.

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

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

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

Ovid

22.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

23.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

25.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

26.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

28.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

29.

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

30.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

31.

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

32.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

33.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

34.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

35.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

36.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

37.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

38.

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

39.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

40.

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

Eliot, T. S.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Kennedy, John F.

45.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

48.

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

49.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

50.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen