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

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

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

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

11.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

12.

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

13.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

15.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

16.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

17.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

18.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

20.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

21.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

22.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

23.

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

Parker, Dorothy

24.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

25.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

26.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

29.

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

30.

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

Cassady, Neal

31.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

32.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

33.

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

Jacob, Max

34.

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

Mann, Horace

35.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

36.

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

37.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

38.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Novalis

41.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

42.

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

43.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

44.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

45.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

46.

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

47.

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

Parker, Dorothy

48.

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

49.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo