Motivational Quotes

Art

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

- Barzun, Jacques

Best Quotes about Art

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

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

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

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

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

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

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

Anderson, Bill

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

13.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

14.

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

Gide, Andre

15.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

16.

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

17.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

18.

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

Mann, Horace

19.

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

20.

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

Sand, George

21.

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

Shakespeare, William

22.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

23.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

24.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

25.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

27.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

28.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

29.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

34.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

35.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

36.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

37.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

38.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

39.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

41.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

42.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

47.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

48.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

49.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.