Motivational Quotes

Art

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

- Zedong, Mao

Best Quotes about Art

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

Eliot, T. S.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

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

Brancusi, Constantin

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

10.

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

11.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

12.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

13.

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

Ciardi, John

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

18.

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

Bangs, Lester

19.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

21.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

22.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

23.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

24.

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)

25.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

26.

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

27.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

28.

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

Cather, Willa

29.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

33.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Ruskin, John

35.

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

36.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

39.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

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

Driscoll, Louise

41.

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

Blackie, Professor

42.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

43.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

44.

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

Parker, Dorothy

45.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

46.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

47.

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

48.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

49.

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

50.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur