Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- West, Rebecca

Best Quotes about Art

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

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

Ambrose Bierce

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

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.

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

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

10.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

11.

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

12.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

13.

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

14.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Sand, George

18.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

19.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

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

Kael, Pauline

21.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

22.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

23.

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

24.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

25.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

26.

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

27.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

28.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

29.

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

William Baziotes

30.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

31.

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

Ben Shahn

32.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

33.

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

34.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

35.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

36.

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

37.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

38.

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

Brown, John Mason

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

41.

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

Picasso, Pablo

42.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

43.

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

44.

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

Simonides

45.

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

46.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

47.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

48.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

49.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

50.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy