100 Inspiring Quotes About Art From Famous Artists
Embark on a journey through the creative minds of the world's most renowned artists with this collection of 100 inspiring quotes about art. These quotes capture the essence of what it means to create, explore, and experience art in all its forms.
From Picasso's reflections on the nature of creativity to Frida Kahlo's insights into pain and passion, each quote offers a glimpse into the profound thoughts and emotions that art can evoke. Whether you're an artist seeking motivation or an art lover looking to delve deeper into the artistic psyche, these quotes will enlighten and inspire you.
- “I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.” — Roy Lichtenstein
- “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 worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ― Sylvia Plath
- “There is no ‘right’ way to make art. The only wrong is in not trying, not doing. Don’t put barriers up that aren’t there — just get to work and make something.” — Lisa Golightly
Edvard Munch Paintings Biography And Quotes
- “The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.” — Stephen Nachmanovitch
- “I think some of the biggest bursts of creativity and artistic growth I’ve had are usually preceded by a big creative block.” — Ashley Goldberg
- “I think it’s important to remember that making art is a process. It is never finished. The occupation itself is one of process, exploration, and experimentation. It is one of questioning and examining.” — Mel Robson
- “When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out – so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don’t need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.” — Caio Fonseca
- “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou
- “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
- “Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse
- “Every artist was first an amateur.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” — Julio Cortázar
- “Routine kills creative thought.” — Scarlett Thomas
- “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows.” — Jim Jarmusch
- "Art is a line around your thoughts.” – Gustav Klimt
- “To be an artist is to believe in life.” – Henry Moore
- “I shut my eyes in order to see.” – Paul Gauguin
- “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” – Auguste Rodin
- “The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.” – Paul Klee
- “Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte
- “The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” – George Inness
- “The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” – Jerzy Kosinski
- “Great art picks up where nature ends.” – Marc Chagall
- “The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.” – Claude Monet
- “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” – Edward Hopper
- “Before I start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say ‘almost’ because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor’s ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea.”- Barbara Hepworth
- “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” – Andy Warhol
- “I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.” – Jean-Michel Basquiat
- “If the artist has outer and inner eyes for nature, nature rewards him by giving him inspiration.” – Wassily Kandinsky
- “It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.” – Louise Bourgeois
- “Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.” – Salvador Dalí
- “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.” – Bob Ross
- “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh
- “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams
- “The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.” – Joan Miró
- “To my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.” – Paul Cézanne
- “No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.” – Edgar Degas
- “There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.” – Helen Frankenthaler
- “In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.” – Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
- “You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.” – Pierre Auguste Renoir
- “The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.” – Vincent Van Gogh
- "If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul." – Paul Cezanne
- “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” – John W. Gardner
- “The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” – Robert Henri
- “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” – Andre Gide
- “I invent nothing, I rediscover.” – Auguste Rodin
- “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” – Vincent van Gogh
- “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.”– Henry Ward Beecher
- “Art is the only way to run away without leaving. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” – Charles Horton Cooley
- “There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.” – Henry Moore
- “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” – Leonardo da Vinci
- “An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.” – Paul Valéry
- “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.” – Georgia O'Keeffe
- “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” – Pablo Picasso
- “A Good artist has less time than ideas.” – Martin Kippenberger
- “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” – Frida Kahlo
- “I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.” – Francis Bacon
- “A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” – Paul Cezanne
- “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” – Aristotle
- “Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” – Stella Adler
- “Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” – Plato
- “What is that you express in your eyesIt seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.” – Walt Whitman
- “I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.” – W. Somerset Maugham
- “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” – Albert Camus
- “Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn’t seem fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.” – Ani DiFranco
- “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.” – Dylan Thomas
- “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” – Ansel Adams
- “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” – Albert Einstein
- “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.” – Raymond Chandler
- “We have art in order not to die of the truth.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.” – Carrie Fisher
- “… and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” – Vincent Van Gogh
- “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” – Anton Chekhov
- “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” – Ansel Adams
- “Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.” – Pablo Casals
- “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” – Flannery O’Connor
- “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . „ – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Art is to console those who are broken by life.” – Vincent Van Gogh
- “The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.” – Walt Whitman
- “I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.” – Seth Godin
- “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth – at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” – Pablo Picasso
- “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” – Leonardo da Vinci
- “Modern paintings are like women, you’ll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.” – Freddie Mercury
- “An idea is salvation by imagination” – Frank Lloyd Wright
- “I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.” – Neil Gaiman
- “In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
- “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein
- “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
- “An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” – J.D. Salinger
- “What do you think an artist is…he is a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” – Pablo Picasso
- "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.” – Schumann
- “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” – Leonardo da Vinci
"Embracing Imperfection in Art: The Path to True Creativity"
"True art is characterized not by the absence of flaws, but by the way it encapsulates imperfections to create something uniquely beautiful." This quote underscores the importance of embracing imperfections in the artistic process, encouraging artists to see mistakes as opportunities for creativity and growth rather than obstacles to perfection.
"The Eternal Dance of Color and Emotion in Art"
"Art is where colors and emotions collide, creating a universe where every hue tells a story." This perspective highlights the powerful relationship between color and emotion in art, suggesting that colors do more than fill space—they convey the depth and complexity of human feelings, making each artwork a narrative woven in shades and tints.
"The Silent Voice of Art in a Noisy World"
"In the cacophony of the modern world, art remains a silent yet profound voice, whispering truths into the souls of those who dare to listen." This quote reflects on the role of art as a sanctuary of tranquility and insight in a world often overwhelmed by noise and distraction, emphasizing its capacity to communicate deep, unspoken truths.
"Art as a Mirror to the Human Condition"
"Art holds up a mirror to the human condition, reflecting our joys, sorrows, and everything in between." This statement captures the essence of art's reflective power, asserting that art not only portrays the world around us but also offers a profound insight into the myriad experiences and emotions that define the human experience.
"The Unending Quest for Expression in Art"
"The quest for expression in art is unending, a perpetual journey into the unknown corners of the soul." Highlighting the never-ending nature of artistic exploration, this quote inspires artists to continually seek new ways to express themselves, suggesting that art is a journey with no final destination, only endless possibilities for discovery and expression.
These additional quotes and insights aim to enrich the conversation about art, offering new perspectives and motivations for artists and art enthusiasts alike to explore the depths of creativity and expression.
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