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 reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

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 heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

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

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

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

West, Rebecca

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

13.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

14.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

15.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

16.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

17.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

18.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

19.

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

20.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

21.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

22.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

24.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

25.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

26.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

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

28.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

29.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

30.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

31.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

32.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

34.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

35.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

36.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

37.

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

Proverb

38.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

39.

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

40.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

41.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Parker, Dorothy

45.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

49.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

50.

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.