Motivational Quotes

Art

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

- Stein, Gertrude

Best Quotes about Art

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

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

Weil, Simone

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

13.

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

14.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

16.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

17.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

18.

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

Bible

19.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

20.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

21.

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

Brown, John Mason

22.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

23.

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

Camus, Albert

24.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

25.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

26.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

27.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

29.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

30.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

31.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

32.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

33.

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

34.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

35.

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

36.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

37.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

41.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

42.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

43.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

44.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

45.

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

Sand, George

46.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

47.

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

Jacob, Max

48.

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.