Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

- Edith Wharton

Best Quotes about Art

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

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

Ward Jenkins

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

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

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

10.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

11.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

12.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

13.

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

14.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

15.

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.

16.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

17.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

18.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

19.

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

20.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

21.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

27.

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

Thurber, James

28.

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

Mann, Horace

29.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

30.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

31.

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

Morris, William

32.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

33.

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

34.

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

Ciardi, John

35.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

36.

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

37.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

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

39.

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

40.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

41.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

42.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

43.

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