Motivational Quotes

Art

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

- Tagore, Rabindranath

Best Quotes about Art

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

Shakespeare, William

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

11.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

12.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

14.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

18.

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

Jovovich, Milla

19.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

20.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

21.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

22.

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

Mann, Horace

23.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

24.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

25.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

26.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb

29.

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

30.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

33.

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

34.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

35.

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

36.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

37.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

38.

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

39.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

40.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

41.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

42.

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

Bellow, Saul

43.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

44.

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

45.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

48.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

49.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

50.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis