Motivational Quotes

Art

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

- Blair, Hugh

Best Quotes about Art

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

Bible

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

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

Shakespeare, William

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Frost, Robert

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

10.

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

11.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

12.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

13.

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

Bellow, Saul

14.

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

G. K. Chesterton

15.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

17.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

18.

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.

19.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

20.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

22.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

23.

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

24.

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

Jacob, Max

25.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

26.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

27.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

28.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

29.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

30.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

31.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

32.

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

33.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

34.

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

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

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

Anderson, Bill

41.

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

Varese, Edward

42.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Einstein, Albert

49.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

50.

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