Motivational Quotes

Art

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

- Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Best Quotes about Art

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

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

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

Sand, George

11.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

12.

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

13.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

14.

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

Schumann, Robert

15.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

19.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

20.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

21.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

22.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

23.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

24.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

25.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

26.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

27.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

28.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

29.

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

Kooning, Willem De

30.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

31.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

32.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

34.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

35.

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

Frye, Northrop

36.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

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

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.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Frost, Robert

42.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

43.

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

44.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

45.

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

46.

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

Melville, Herman

47.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

48.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

49.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

50.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.