Motivational Quotes

Art

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

- Pound, Ezra

Best Quotes about Art

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

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

Baudelaire, Charles

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

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Frost, Robert

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

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

Frye, Northrop

10.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

11.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

15.

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

Camus, Albert

16.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

17.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

18.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

19.

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

20.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

21.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

22.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

23.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

24.

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.

25.

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

Weil, Simone

26.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

28.

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

29.

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

Kooning, Willem De

30.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

31.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

32.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

34.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

35.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

36.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

37.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

38.

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

Sand, George

39.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

41.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

42.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

43.

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

Midler, Bette

44.

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

45.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

46.

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

Proverb

47.

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

Cassady, Neal

48.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

49.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

50.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William