Motivational Quotes

Art

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

- Ginsberg, Allen

Best Quotes about Art

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

Love can heal a broken heart.

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

Eugene Delacroix

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

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

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

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

Weil, Simone

10.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

11.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

12.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

13.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

17.

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

18.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

19.

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

Anderson, Judith

20.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

21.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

22.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

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

24.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

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

26.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

27.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

28.

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

29.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

30.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

31.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

32.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

33.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

34.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

35.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

36.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

37.

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

Schumann, Robert

38.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

39.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Mann, Horace

41.

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

Morris, William

42.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

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

Novalis

44.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

49.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

50.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard