Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Art

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

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

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

10.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

11.

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

Jeff Melvoin

12.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Frye, Northrop

14.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

15.

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

16.

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

Arp, Jean

17.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

18.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

19.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

23.

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

24.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

25.

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

Holyfield, Evander

26.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

27.

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

28.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

29.

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

Simonides

30.

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

31.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

32.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

33.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

34.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

35.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

36.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Proverb

40.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

41.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

42.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

43.

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

44.

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

Cioran, E. M.

45.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

46.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

47.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

48.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

49.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

50.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul