Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Waugh, Evelyn

Best Quotes about Art

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

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

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

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

10.

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

Blackie, Professor

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Joyce, James

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

16.

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.

17.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

18.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

19.

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

Morris, William

20.

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

21.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

22.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

23.

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

24.

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

Ben Shahn

25.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

26.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

27.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

28.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

29.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

30.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

31.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

32.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

33.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

34.

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

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

37.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

38.

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

Updike, John

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

42.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

43.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

44.

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

Kempis, Thomas

45.

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

46.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

47.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

48.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

49.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

50.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.