Motivational Quotes

Art

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Art

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

Brown, John Mason

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

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

Mann, Horace

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

10.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

16.

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

Peri, Gabriel

17.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

18.

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

19.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

20.

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

Duke Ellington

21.

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

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

24.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

25.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

26.

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

27.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

28.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

29.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

30.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

31.

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

32.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

33.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

34.

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

35.

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

George Tooker

36.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

37.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

38.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

39.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

40.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

41.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

42.

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

Proverb

43.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

44.

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

45.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

46.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

47.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

48.

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