Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

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

Piet Mondrian

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Ruckett

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

10.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

11.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

12.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

13.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

14.

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

Jeff Melvoin

15.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

17.

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

18.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

19.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

20.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

21.

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

22.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

23.

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

Picasso, Pablo

24.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

26.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

27.

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

28.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

29.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

30.

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

Mann, Horace

31.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

32.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

37.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

39.

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

40.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

41.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

46.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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