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

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

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

Camus, Albert

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

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

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

Pascal, Blaise

10.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

11.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

12.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

13.

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

14.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

16.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

17.

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

18.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

19.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

20.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

21.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

22.

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

Parker, Dorothy

23.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

24.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

25.

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

26.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

27.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

28.

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

29.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

30.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

31.

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

Driscoll, Louise

32.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

33.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

34.

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

35.

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

Keller, Helen

36.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

37.

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

Brown, John Mason

38.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

39.

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

40.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

41.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

42.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

43.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

44.

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

45.

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

46.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

47.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

48.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

50.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri