Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

10.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

11.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

12.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

13.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

14.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

15.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

16.

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

17.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

19.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

20.

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

21.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

23.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

24.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

25.

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

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.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

28.

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

Mann, Horace

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

West, Rebecca

32.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

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

34.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

35.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

36.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

37.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

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

Ovid

39.

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

G. K. Chesterton

40.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

41.

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

42.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

43.

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

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Ruskin, John

46.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

47.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.