Motivational Quotes

Art

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

- Thurber, James

Best Quotes about Art

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Warhol, Andy

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

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

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Camus, Albert

10.

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

11.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

12.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

13.

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

14.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

15.

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

Arp, Jean

16.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

17.

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

18.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

19.

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

20.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

21.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

22.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

23.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

24.

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

Ambrose Bierce

25.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

26.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

27.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

28.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

29.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

31.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

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.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

36.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

37.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

38.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

39.

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

40.

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

Jovovich, Milla

41.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

42.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

43.

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

44.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

45.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

46.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

47.

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

George Tooker

48.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

49.

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

West, Rebecca

50.

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