Motivational Quotes

Art

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Best Quotes about Art

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

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.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

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

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

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

William Baziotes

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

10.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

11.

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.

12.

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

Gide, Andre

13.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

20.

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

David Cronenberg

21.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

22.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

23.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

25.

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

26.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

27.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

28.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

29.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

30.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

35.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

36.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

40.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

41.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

47.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

48.

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

Frost, Robert

49.

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

50.

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