Motivational Quotes

Art

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

- Gandhi, Indira

Best Quotes about Art

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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

Shakespeare, William

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

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

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

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

Picasso, Pablo

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.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

10.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

11.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

12.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

13.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

14.

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

15.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

16.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

17.

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

18.

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

William Baziotes

19.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

20.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

21.

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.

22.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

26.

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

Wilson, Robert

27.

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

28.

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

Morris, William

29.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

30.

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

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.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

36.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

37.

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

Proust, Marcel

38.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

39.

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

40.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

41.

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

42.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

43.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

44.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

45.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

46.

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

47.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

48.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

49.

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

50.

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