Best Art Quotes and Sayings
The best art quotes and sayings have inspired many to discover themselves and pursue their true calling. You don’t have to be an artist to understand the value and beauty of a piece of art.
Art can touch the soul of even the most untrained eye. It can take you into a new world you may never want to leave again.
Here are some of the best inspiring quotes on art that can give a new direction to your thoughts. You can never know what they can inspire you to do or become. Check these quotations out; you may even share them with your friends and loved ones.
Quotes about Art
1.) Art, indeed, began with abstraction.
Sigfried Giedion
2.) 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.
William Faulkner
3.) The greatest scientists are artists as well.
Albert Einstein
4.) Art must destroy violence; only it can do it.
Leo Tolstoy
5.) It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.
Theodor W. Adorno
6.) The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artists.
Robert Brault
7.) Art holds fast when all else is lost.
German Proverb
8.) Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
9.) To be an artist is to believe in life.
Henry Moore
10.) Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
Georgia O’Keeffe
The Arts Sayings
11.) Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.
Stella Adler
12.) All art requires courage.
Anne Tucker
13.) Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp
14.) Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.
Andre Gide
15.) It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of its maker and beholder meet.
Kojiro Tomita
16.) Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
Leo Tolstoy
17.) 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
18.) Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe
19.) To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
E.M. Forster
20.) It is no wonder if Art frequently prefers Illusion to Truth: for Illusion is her servant, but Truth her mistress.
Richard Garnett
21.) Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser
Famous Artists Quotes
22.) Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
23.) I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Henri Matisse
24.) Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
25.) To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts — such is the duty of the artist.
Schumann
26.) Painting is silent poetry.
Plutarch
27.) If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper
28.) If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo
29.) Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is a painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci
30.) The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.
Joan Miro
31.) I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Vincent van Gogh
32.) Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso
33.) The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.
Auguste Rodin
34.) I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
Roy Lichtenstein
35.) Art is not what you see but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
36.) Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall
Artists Sayings
37.) If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then, by all means, paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent van Gogh
38.) The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian
39.) It took me four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Pablo Picasso
40.) An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
Michelangelo
Creative Quotations
41.) Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
42.) Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse
43.) You can’t use up creativity; the more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou
44.) Design is so simple. That’s why it’s complicated.
Paul Rand
45.) Color is to the eye what music is to the ear.
Louis Comfort Tiffany
46.) Think eight hours, work two hours.
Mirko Ilic
47.) I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo
48.) There are three responses to a piece of design: yes, no, and wow.
Milton Glaser
49.) Painting is easy when you don’t know how but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas
50.) Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
Joe Sparano
51.) But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
Carl Jung
52.) The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.
Kapil Gupta
53.) What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
Eugene Delacroix
Best Art Quotes
54.) Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
55.) The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance.
Aristotle
56.) Perfection in art, as often in life, is better captured by an eraser than a pencil.
Robert Brault
57.) Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso
58.) The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
59.) Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
60.) With art, only talent counts.
Arthur Schopenhauer
61.) Painting is a poem without words.
Horace
62.) Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert
63.) Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt
64.) Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.
Paul Klee
65.) I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Albert Einstein
66.) Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
67.) Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
John Ruskin
68.) Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard
69.) Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy
Tip: Some of these art quotes work well as photo captions on Instagram and Facebook.
Inspirational Art Quotes
70.) There is no must in art because art is free.
Wassily Kandinsky
71.) Colour is my day-long obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet
72.) The principle of true art is not to portray but to evoke.
Jerzy Kosinski
73.) In the mind of every artist, there is a masterpiece.
Kai Greene
74.) I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
75.) A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.
Salvador Dali
76.) Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
77.) If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
John F. Kennedy
Motivational Art Quotes and Sayings
78.) I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent.I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.
Bob Ross
79.) Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
80.) Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Anais Nin
81.) The object of art is not to reproduce reality but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Alberto Giacometti
82.) Every good artist paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock
83.) Painting is a source of endless pleasure but also of great anguish.
Balthus
84.) An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James McNeill Whistler
Creativity and Beauty Art Quotes
85.) Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.
Oscar Wilde
86.) To draw, you must close your eyes and sing
Pablo Picasso
87.) I choose to paint beauty.
Igor Babailov
88.) When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds, there is an awareness of perfection.
Agnes Martin
89.) Art is both the taking and giving of beauty; the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world;
Ansel Adams
90.) Beauty will save the world.
Dostoevsky
91.) As an artist, I’d choose the thing that’s beautiful more than the one that’s true.
Laurie Anderson
92.) But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
Frank Lloyd Wright
93.) A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
John Keats
94.) Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
Jean Anouilh
95.) How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
Tennessee Williams
96.) Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
Marcus Aurelius
97.) Creativity exists in the present moment. You can’t find it anywhere else.
Natalie Goldberg
98.) The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
Sir Francis Bacon
The Beauty of Art Quotes
99.) He who works with his hands and his head, and his heart is an artist.
St Francis of Assisi
100.) The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Sir Francis Bacon
101.) One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
102.) There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Pablo Picasso
103.) Every good painter paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock
104.) Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dali
105.) The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.
Kurt Vonnegut
106.) We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.
Bob Ross
107.) Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein
108.) I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo
By Michael O’Halloran
Michael O’Halloran founded Greeting Card Poet in 2014 and has worked as its publisher and editor ever since. He has co-authored four books on kids’ trivia and four on coaching. Previously, Michael was the president of Magnetic Poetry. He has invented and brought over 75 new gift and toy products to market, most of which deal with wordplay. Mike is married and a father of four daughters.
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