Best Art Quotes and Sayings

The best art quotes and sayings in this world 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 that you may never want to leave again.

Here are some of the best inspiring quotes on arts 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, and you may even share them with your friends and loved ones.

Quotes about Art

Art, indeed, began with abstraction.
Sigfried Giedion

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

The greatest scientists are artists as well.
Albert Einstein

Art must destroy violence, only it can do it.
Leo Tolstoy

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

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

Art holds fast when all else is lost.
German Proverb

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher

To be an artist is to believe in life.
Henry Moore

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
Georgia O’Keeffe

Best art quotes and sayings.

The Arts Sayings

Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.
Stella Adler

All art requires courage.
Anne Tucker

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.
Andre Gide

It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of its maker and beholder meet.
Kojiro Tomita

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

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

Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe

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

It is no wonder if Art frequently prefers Illusion to Truth: for Illusion is her servant, but Truth her mistress.
Richard Garnett

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

Quotes about Art image

Famous Artists Quotes

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso

I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
Henri Matisse

Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso

To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts — such is the duty of the artist.
Schumann

Painting is silent poetry.
Plutarch

If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper

If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is a painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.
Joan Miro

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.
Vincent van Gogh

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.
Auguste Rodin

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
Roy Lichtenstein

Art is not what you see but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas

Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall

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

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
Piet Mondrian

It took me four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Pablo Picasso

An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
Michelangelo

Art Quotes image

Creative Quotations

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse

You can’t use up creativity; the more you use, the more you have.
Maya Angelou

Design is so simple. That’s why it’s complicated.
Paul Rand

Color is to the eye what music is to the ear.
Louis Comfort Tiffany

Think eight hours, work two hours.
Mirko Ilic

I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo

There are three responses to a piece of design: yes, no, and wow.
Milton Glaser

Painting is easy when you don’t know how but very difficult when you do.
Edgar Degas

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
Joe Sparano

But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.
Carl Jung

The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.
Kapil Gupta

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

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their inward significance.
Aristotle

Perfection in art, as often in life, is better captured by an eraser than a pencil.
Robert Brault

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso

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

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw

With art, only talent counts.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Painting is a poem without words.
Horace

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Gustave Flaubert

Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt

Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.
Paul Klee

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Albert Einstein

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
John Ruskin

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard

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

There is no must in art because art is free.
Wassily Kandinsky

Colour is my day-long obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet

The principle of true art is not to portray but to evoke.
Jerzy Kosinski

In the mind of every artist, there is a masterpiece.
Kai Greene

I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo

A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.
Salvador Dali

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde

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

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

Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The object of art is not to reproduce reality but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Alberto Giacometti

Every good artist paints what he is.
Jackson Pollock

Painting is a source of endless pleasure but also of great anguish.
Balthus

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
James McNeill Whistler

Creativity and Beauty

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.
Oscar Wilde

To draw, you must close your eyes and sing
Pablo Picasso

I choose to paint beauty.
Igor Babailov

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

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

Beauty will save the world.
Dostoevsky

As an artist, I’d choose the thing that’s beautiful more than the one that’s true.
Laurie Anderson

But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
Frank Lloyd Wright

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
John Keats

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
Jean Anouilh

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
Tennessee Williams

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
Marcus Aurelius

Creativity exists in the present moment. You can’t find it anywhere else.
Natalie Goldberg

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
Sir Francis Bacon

Beauty of Art

He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
St Francis of Assisi

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Sir Francis Bacon

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

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

Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein

By Mike O’Halloran

Mike is the editor and founder of Greeting Card Poet.

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