Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

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.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

10.

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

11.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

12.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

13.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

14.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

15.

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

Wilson, Robert

16.

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

17.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

20.

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

Morris, William

21.

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

Mann, Horace

22.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

23.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

24.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

25.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

26.

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

Pascal, Blaise

27.

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

28.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

29.

Love can heal a broken heart.

30.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

33.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

34.

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

Berle, Adolf

35.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

36.

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

Gutzkow

37.

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

38.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

39.

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

Keller, Helen

40.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

41.

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

42.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

43.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

45.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

46.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

47.

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

Midler, Bette

48.

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

Ambrose Bierce

49.

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

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo