Motivational Quotes

Art

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

- Cocteau, Jean

Best Quotes about Art

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

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

11.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

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

13.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

14.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

15.

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

16.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

21.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

22.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

23.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

24.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

25.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

26.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

27.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

29.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

30.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

34.

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

Holyfield, Evander

35.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

36.

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

37.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

38.

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)

39.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

41.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

42.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

43.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

44.

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

Proverb

45.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

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

47.

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

48.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

49.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

50.

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

Schumann, Robert