Motivational Quotes

Art

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)

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

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

Novalis

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

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

Gutzkow

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Kooning, Willem De

10.

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

Kennedy, John F.

11.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

12.

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

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

Eugene Delacroix

14.

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

Zola, Emile

15.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

16.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

17.

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

Parker, Dorothy

18.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

19.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

20.

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

21.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

22.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

23.

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

Cioran, E. M.

24.

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

Proverb

25.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

29.

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

Varese, Edward

30.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

31.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

32.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

33.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

37.

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

Moses, Grandma

38.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

39.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

40.

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

41.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

42.

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

Weil, Simone

43.

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

44.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

45.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

46.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

47.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

Ruckett

49.

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.

50.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes