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

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

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

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

Weil, Simone

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

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

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

10.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

11.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

12.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

13.

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

14.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

15.

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

16.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

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

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

20.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

23.

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

Brown, John Mason

24.

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

25.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

26.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

27.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

28.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

30.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

32.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

33.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

34.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

35.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

36.

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

37.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

38.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

39.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

40.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

41.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

42.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

43.

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

44.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

45.

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

46.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

50.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin