Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Art

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

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

Motherwell, Robert

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

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

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

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

Proverb

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

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

11.

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

Jeff Melvoin

12.

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

Eliot, T. S.

13.

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

Camus, Albert

14.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

17.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

18.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

19.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

20.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

26.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

29.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

30.

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

Thurber, James

31.

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

32.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

33.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

34.

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

35.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

36.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

37.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

38.

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)

39.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

40.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

41.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

42.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

43.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

44.

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

Anderson, Bill

45.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

46.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Weil, Simone

48.

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.

49.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

50.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford