Motivational Quotes

Art

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Art

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

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

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

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

10.

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

Murdoch, Iris

11.

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

12.

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

West, Rebecca

13.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

14.

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

15.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

16.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

17.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

19.

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

20.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

21.

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

Cassady, Neal

22.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

27.

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

28.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

30.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

31.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

32.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

33.

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

Picasso, Pablo

34.

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

35.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

36.

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

Simonides

37.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

38.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

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.

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

Isak Dineson

41.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

42.

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

Mann, Horace

43.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

44.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

45.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

46.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

47.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

48.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

49.

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

Proverb

50.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert