Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Art

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

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

Morris, William

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

10.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

11.

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

Cassady, Neal

12.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

13.

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

14.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

17.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

18.

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

Frye, Northrop

19.

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

20.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

22.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

23.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

24.

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

Driscoll, Louise

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.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

31.

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

Proust, Marcel

32.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

33.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

34.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

35.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

36.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

40.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

41.

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

Woodberry, George E.

42.

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

43.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

44.

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

45.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo