Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Weil, Simone

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 is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

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

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

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

Baudelaire, Charles

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Buckingham, Duke of

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

10.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

11.

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

Connolly, Cyril

12.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

14.

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

15.

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

16.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

17.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

18.

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

19.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

20.

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

Bellow, Saul

21.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

22.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

24.

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

25.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

26.

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

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

27.

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

28.

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

Anderson, Judith

29.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

30.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

32.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

33.

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

Picasso, Pablo

34.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

35.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

36.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

37.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

38.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

40.

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

41.

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

Berle, Adolf

42.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

44.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

45.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

46.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

47.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

48.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

49.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

50.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell