Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Thurber, James

Best Quotes about Art

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

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

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

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

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

Morris, William

11.

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

12.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

13.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

14.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

15.

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

16.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

19.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

20.

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

21.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

22.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

23.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

24.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

25.

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

Parker, Dorothy

26.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

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.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

33.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

34.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Mann, Horace

36.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

37.

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

Varese, Edward

38.

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.

39.

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

Kennedy, John F.

40.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

41.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

42.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

44.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

45.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

46.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

47.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

48.

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

Cather, Willa

49.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

50.

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