Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Simonides

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

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

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

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

Mann, Horace

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

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

Truman, Harry S

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

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

Bierce, Ambrose

10.

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

11.

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

Driscoll, Louise

12.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

13.

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

Holyfield, Evander

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

17.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

18.

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

Cioran, E. M.

19.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

20.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

21.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

23.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

24.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

25.

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

26.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

27.

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

28.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

29.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

30.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

31.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

32.

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

33.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

34.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

35.

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

36.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

37.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

38.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

39.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

40.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

41.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

42.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

45.

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

Weil, Simone

46.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

47.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

48.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.