Motivational Quotes

Art

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Art

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.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

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

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

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

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

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

10.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

11.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

12.

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

Warhol, Andy

13.

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

Cassady, Neal

14.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

15.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

16.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

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

18.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

22.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

23.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

24.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

25.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

26.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

27.

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

Churchill, Winston

28.

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

29.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

30.

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

31.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

32.

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

Frost, Robert

33.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

34.

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

Proust, Marcel

35.

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

36.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

37.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

38.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

39.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

40.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

41.

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

42.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

43.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

44.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

45.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

46.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

47.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

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

49.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

50.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo