Motivational Quotes

Art

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

- Faulkner, William

Best Quotes about Art

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

Howe, Nathaniel

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

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

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

Kooning, Willem De

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.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

10.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

18.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Cioran, E. M.

21.

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

22.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

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

24.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

25.

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

26.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

27.

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

Morris, William

28.

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

Brown, John Mason

29.

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

30.

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

Schumann, Robert

31.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

32.

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

33.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

34.

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

35.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

36.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

37.

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

38.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

39.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

40.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

41.

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

42.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

44.

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

45.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

46.

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

Ward Jenkins

47.

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

48.

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