Motivational Quotes

Art

Every artist was first an amateur.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Best Quotes about Art

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.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Kennedy, John F.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

14.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

15.

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

16.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

17.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

19.

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

Ambrose Bierce

20.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

21.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

22.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

23.

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

Parker, Dorothy

24.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

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

26.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

27.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

28.

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

29.

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

Kael, Pauline

30.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

31.

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

Ruckett

32.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

33.

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

34.

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

Morris, William

35.

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

36.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

37.

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

Mann, Horace

38.

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

Bellow, Saul

39.

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

40.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

41.

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

42.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

43.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

44.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

45.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

46.

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

Walt Whitman

47.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

48.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

49.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

50.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William