Motivational Quotes

Art

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

- Havel, Vaclav

Best Quotes about Art

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

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

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

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

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

Havel, Vaclav

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

10.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

11.

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

Wilson, Robert

12.

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

13.

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

14.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

15.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

16.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

18.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

19.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

21.

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

Eugene Delacroix

22.

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

23.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

24.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

28.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

29.

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

30.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

31.

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

Cassady, Neal

32.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

33.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

34.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

35.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

36.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

37.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

38.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

39.

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

Thurber, James

40.

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

41.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

42.

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

43.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

44.

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

David Cronenberg

45.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

46.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

47.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

48.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

49.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

50.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William