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Mankind has been creating and appreciating art since its very beginnings. These art quotes celebrate all the beauty and creativity that art provides.
Whether it’s an ancient cave painting, the work of the famed Old Masters of the Renaissance, or at the cutting edge of Modern Art, art has the capacity to capture a moment in time and stir up our emotions.
So enjoy these quotes from celebrated artists and enjoy their inspiration to make the world more beautiful today.
Top 10 Art Quotes
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be an artist is to believe in life.
Henry Moore
PinArt enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Leonardo da Vinci
Art is to console those who are broken by life.
Vincent Van Gogh
PinArt should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Banksy
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso
Quotes about Art
The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.
Paul Cézanne
Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.
Albert Einstein
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
Neil Gaiman
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
One eye sees, the other feels.
Paul Klee
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso
PinArt is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.
Albert Einstein
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
Paul Cézanne
Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
Banksy
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Leonardo da Vinci
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
Pablo Picasso
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy —the joy of being Salvador Dalí— and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
Salvador Dalí
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.
André Gide
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
Pin… and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?
Vincent Van Gogh
Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
Alberto Giacometti
Art deteriorates when it is done for the audience.
James Pierce
Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.
Ernest Hemingway
PinArt is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.
Albert Einstein
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
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
John F. Kennedy
The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship.
Rick Rubin
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
Leonardo da Vinci
Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Leon Trotsky
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.
Georges Braque
What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.
Marcel Duchamp
PinArt wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.
Rainbow Rowell
Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.
Agnes Martin
Art is my life and my life is art.
Yoko Ono
Art must destroy violence, only it can do it.
Leo Tolstoy
Art Quotes From Artists
If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.
Henri Matisse
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Oscar Wilde
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo
Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
Andy Warhol
PinI shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin
I must have flowers, always, and always.
Claude Monet
I couldn’t give you something mediocre even if that’s all you asked for.
Michelangelo
Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.
Rembrandt
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.
Michelangelo
Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.
Claude Monet
I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo
I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo
PinA work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.
Rembrandt
Without tradition art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation it is a corpse.
Winston Churchill
Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.
Leonardo da Vinci
Creativity takes courage.
Henri Matisse
Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.
Keith Haring
No great work of art is ever finished.
Michelangelo
Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.
Gustav Klimt
What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.
Claude Monet
PinA beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.
Leonardo da Vinci
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo
It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.
Paul Cézanne
Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.
Marc Chagall
The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.
Robert Henri
Quotes about Artists
All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?
Banksy
A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.
Salvador Dalí
PinNot everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.
Peter O’Toole
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Pablo Picasso
You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.
Rick Riordan
A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.
Rembrandt
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola
The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
Paul Strand
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
Charles Cooley
PinThe modern artist is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.
Jackson Pollock
An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.
Andre Malraux
A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.
Salvador Dalí
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.
Edgard Varese
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
Eric Gill
An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski
An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success.
Henri Matisse
In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.
Kai Green
PinAn artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.
J.D. Salinger
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
Robert Hughes
The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
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 artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana
PinArtists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.
Al Hirschfield
Man needs music, literature, and painting – all those oases of perfection that make up art – to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.
Fernando Botero
An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Andy Warhol
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
Francis Bacon
The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.
Paul Gauguin
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Pablo Picasso
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
Henry Ward Beecher
PinHumorous Art Quotes
What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.
Tom Stoppard
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
George Bernard Shaw
The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will spark off a revolution.
Paul Cézanne
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Oscar Wilde
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can’t stand Picasso, those who can’t stand Raphael, and those who have never heard of either.
John White
We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.
Bob Ross
PinVan Gogh would have sold more than one painting if he’d put tigers in them.
Tom Hobbes
I would never have taken up painting if women did not have breasts.
Pierre Auguste Renoir
If you have a burning restless urge to paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.
Fran Lebowitz
An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
Ben Shahn
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
Rembrandt painted 700 pictures. Of these 3,000 are in existence.
Wilhelm Bode
PinIf the old masters had labelled their fruit, one wouldn’t be so likely to mistake pears for turnips.
Mark Twain
The more you look at modern art exhibits, the more everything begins to look like an exhibit, including the attendant’s chair and the fire extinguisher.
Brian Sewell
I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.
Georgia O’Keeffe
If you’re enjoying these humorous quotes about art, you’ll also love our 300 Funny Quotes to Make You Laugh for even more laughable lines from people who make comedy their art.
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I guess I’m a little weird. I like to talk to trees and animals. That’s okay though; I have more fun than most people.
Bob Ross
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
Pablo Picasso
PinThere are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
Charles Dickens
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
Samuel Butler
Art is art, isn’t it? And water is water and east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple-sauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
Groucho Marx
Becoming an artist, like becoming a writer, can be a daunting prospect. After all, the great Van Gogh barely sold any of his paintings in his lifetime.
However, whether you’re interested in paint, pottery, sculpture, watercolor, or even photography, it’s never too late to follow your passion and become an artist.
We hope these art quotes inspire you wherever you are in your creative journey and encourage you to make some art today.
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