Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

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

Isak Dineson

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

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

10.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

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

Murdoch, Iris

12.

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

13.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

14.

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

15.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

16.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

17.

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

18.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

19.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

20.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

21.

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

22.

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

Proverb

23.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

28.

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

Moses, Grandma

29.

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

30.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

31.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

32.

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

Ruckett

33.

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

34.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

35.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

36.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

37.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

38.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

39.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

40.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

41.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

42.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

43.

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

44.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

45.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

46.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

47.

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

48.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

49.

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

50.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon