Motivational Quotes

Art

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

- Proverb, Danish

Best Quotes about Art

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

Buckingham, Duke of

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

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

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

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

Pascal, Blaise

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

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

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

10.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

16.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

17.

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

Walt Whitman

18.

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

G. K. Chesterton

19.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

20.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

21.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

22.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

23.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

24.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

25.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

26.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

27.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

28.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

29.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

Kennedy, John F.

32.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

33.

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

34.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

35.

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

Pablo Picasso

36.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

37.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

38.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

39.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

40.

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

Burroughs, William S.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

44.

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

45.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

46.

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

Thurber, James

47.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

48.

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

49.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

50.

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