Motivational Quotes

Art

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

- Richter, Jean Paul

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Anderson, Bill

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

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

Cioran, E. M.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

10.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

11.

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

Yu Cao

12.

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

13.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

14.

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

15.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

16.

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

17.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

18.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

19.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

21.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

22.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

23.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

24.

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

Lowell, James Russell

25.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

26.

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

27.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

28.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

29.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

30.

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

Pablo Picasso

31.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

32.

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

Brown, John Mason

33.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

34.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

35.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

36.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

37.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

38.

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

39.

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

Proverb

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Cassady, Neal

43.

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

Anderson, Judith

44.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

45.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

46.

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

47.

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

Burroughs, William S.

48.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

49.

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

50.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon