Motivational Quotes

Art

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

- Gide, Andre

Best Quotes about Art

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

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

Mann, Horace

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

10.

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

11.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

12.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

13.

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

Isak Dineson

14.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

15.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

16.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

17.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

18.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

Murdoch, Iris

23.

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

24.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

25.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

26.

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

27.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

28.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

29.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

30.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

31.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

35.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

37.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

38.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

39.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

40.

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

41.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

42.

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

43.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

44.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

45.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

46.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

47.

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.

48.

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

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.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid