Art Quotes

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. ― Pablo Picasso

Here is a selection of some of the most famous quotes about Art and Creativity: Inspirational Art Quotes about Life. Power of Art Quotes. Short Quotes about Art, Creativity and Life. Art Quotes for Instagram and Twitter. Art Quotes from Famous Artists. Famous Art Quotes about Life and Love.


Art Quotes and Sayings

Everything you can imagine is real.

Pablo Picasso


This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau


Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

― Leonardo da Vinci


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 must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche


Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

― Ansel Adams


Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

― Pablo Picasso


Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

― Jonathan Swift


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

― Pablo Picasso


Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Winston Churchill


A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

― Leonardo da Vinci


Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

― Ambrose Bierce


I dream my painting and I paint my dream.

― Vincent Willem van Gogh


The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

― Michelangelo


Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

― Clive Barker


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

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

― Henri Matisse


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


What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

― Edward Hopper


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.

― Émile Zola


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

― Roy Lichtenstein


Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

― Chuck Klosterman


An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

― Charles Bukowski


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

― Thomas Merton


A picture is a poem without words.

― Horace


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

― Pablo Picasso


The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

― Dale Carnegie


...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

― Vincent Willem van Gogh


I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

― Le Corbusier


Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

― John Keats


There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

― Georges Braque


This world is but a canvas to our imagination. ― Henry David Thoreau

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

― Woody Allen


Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

― Salvador Dali


Personality is everything in art and poetry.

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that's gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

― Karl Lagerfeld


I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

― Jackson Pollock


Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

― C.S. Lewis


If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

― Honore de Balzac


Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

― Edgar Degas


Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

― Thomas Wolfe


There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

― Vincent Van Gogh


Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

― Dorothea Lange


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


Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.

― Charles Eames


Creativity takes courage.

― Henri Matisse


All art is but imitation of nature.

― Lucius Annaeus Seneca


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

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

― Oscar Wilde


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


Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

― Pablo Picasso


I paint with shapes.

― Alexander Calder


I don't mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can't be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won't like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it's based on femininity.

― Marilyn Monroe


An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

― Langston Hughes


Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

― Oscar Wilde


Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

― Edgar Degas


Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

― Oscar Wilde


Life is short, the art long.

― Hippocrates


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

― Friedrich Nietzsche


To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

― Robert Schumann


One eye sees, the other feels.

― Paul Klee


Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

― M. C. Escher


You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

― Ansel Adams


Life is short, the art long. ― Hippocrates

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

― Quintilian


The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

― Lester Bangs


An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

― Paul Valery


Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

― Oscar Wilde


Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

― John Ruskin


When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

― Pablo Picasso


Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

― Lincoln Steffens


The human body is the best work of art.

― Jess C. Scott


Painting and writing are solitary arts.

― Conrad Hall


There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun

― Pablo Picasso


Art is not a thing; it is a way.

― Elbert Hubbard


When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

― Lady Gaga


Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

― Leo Tolstoy


A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.

― Diane Arbus


Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

― Robert Quillen


Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. ― Pablo Picasso

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

― Leonardo da Vinci


Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

― Paul Cezanne


If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

― Yann Martel


The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

― Friedrich Nietzsche


Nature is a haunted house - but Art - is a house that tries to be haunted.

― Emily Dickinson


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

― Scott Adams


The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly.

― Pierre Bonnard


If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.

― John Lennon


Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

― Gilbert K. Chesterton


Art is to console those who are broken by life.

― Vincent van Gogh


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

― Harry S Truman


The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.

― Pablo Picasso


The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

― Francis Bacon


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


Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. ― Jonathan Swift

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

― Twyla Tharp


Art is the proper task of life.

― Friedrich Nietzsche


Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

― Andre Gide


Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.

― Laurie Halse Anderson


In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

― Ernst Fischer


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


I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

― Diane Arbus


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

― Aristotle


A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

― Hedy Lamarr


He took his pain and turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that's what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.

― Hannah Harrington


Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

― Franz Liszt


And now, I'm just trying to change the world, one sequin at a time.

― Lady Gaga


An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

― James Whistler


Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art.

― Carlos Ruiz Zafon


Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

― Igor Stravinsky


Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

― Toni Morrison


If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

― Arne Jacobsen


Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

― Cesar A. Cruz


The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

― Jerzy Kosinski


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


You can't do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

― John Singer Sargent


All art is quite useless.

― Oscar Wilde


Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

― Giotto di Bondone


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.

― Saint Francis of Assisi


Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

― Fran Lebowitz


You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

― George Bernard Shaw


Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

― Jean Cocteau


I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.

― Frida Kahlo


To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

― Alexander Pope


You don't take a photograph, you make it.

― Ansel Adams


When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

― Edward Steichen


We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

― Ursula K. Le Guin


Absurdity and anti―absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.

― Karl Lagerfeld


The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

― Alfred Stieglitz


The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

― Mikhail Bakunin


Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.

― Confucius


Art is the daughter of freedom.

― Friedrich Schiller


The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.

― Woody Allen


The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

― Albert Einstein


There is nothing new in art except talent.

― Anton Chekhov


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

― G.K. Chesterton


Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.

― Ossie Davis


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

― David Hockney


It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

― John Irving


A blank canvas... has unlimited possibilities.

― Stephanie Perkins


The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

― William Morris Hunt


Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

― Ingmar Bergman


In art, the obvious is a sin.

― Edward Dmytryk


Imagination governs the world.

― Napoleon Bonaparte


What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, 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


All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour, so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology.

― George Lucas


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


The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

― Walt Whitman


The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

― Theodor W. Adorno


Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.

― Danny Kaye


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


Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

― Ad Reinhardt


Art is what you can get away with.

― Andy Warhol


All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

― Roman Payne


Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.

― Alfred Sisley


If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gogh, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.

― Jasper Fforde


The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

― Robert Hughes


That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

― Corita Kent


Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.

― Frank Zappa


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


Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

― Kiki Smith


A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

― Ansel Adams


It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

― Stephen King


A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

― Eugene Ionesco


Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.

― Freddie Mercury


All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet - it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

― Joss Whedon


The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

― Carl Rogers


For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

― Friedrich Nietzsche


I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

― Madonna


The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

― George Sand


Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.

― Austin Kleon


The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

― Émile Zola


It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

― Alfred Eisenstaedt


'Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?'

― Mark Lawrence


Here's to freedom, cheers to art. Here's to having an excellent adventure and may the stopping never start.

― Jason Mraz


Painting is by nature a luminous language.

― Robert Delaunay


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

― George Bernard Shaw


True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.

― Arthur Rimbaud


Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

― Egon Schiele


It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

― Alain de Botton


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


One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

― Balthus


I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist.

― Billy Joel


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

― Stella Adler


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

― Theodore Dreiser


Music is an outburst of the soul.

― Frederick Delius


Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.

― Constantin Stanislavski


My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.

― Tadao Ando


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


Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

― Banksy


Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

― Pablo Picasso


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


Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.

― Arthur Schopenhauer


Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

― W. Somerset Maugham


A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

― Vladimir Nabokov


If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces.

― Shane Koyczan


All good art is an indiscretion.

― Tennessee Williams


Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

― Oscar Wilde


To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

― Akira Kurosawa


The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

― Robert Rauschenberg


What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

― John Keats


There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

― Pablo Picasso


I never called my work an 'art'. It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

― Walt Disney


I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

― steve martin


Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

― Susan Sontag


All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

― Federico Fellini


A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

― Henri Cartier-Bresson


The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

― Clive Barker


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


The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.

― Charles Bukowski


If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

― Edward Hopper


What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

― John Berger


An idea is salvation by imagination

― Frank Lloyd Wright


Take your broken heart, make it into art.

― Carrie Fisher


Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

― Agnes Martin


You gotta know when to be lazy. Done correctly, it's an art form that benefits everyone.

― Nicholas Sparks


Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

― Don Miguel Ruiz


All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

― Iris Murdoch


How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn't pull the trigger?

― Virginia Woolf


I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

― Carrie Fisher


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

― Joan Miro


Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

― Ray Bradbury


Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.

― Donald Woods Winnicott


I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

― Ludwig Mies van der Rohe


Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.

― Pope John Paul II


The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

― Steven Pressfield


Layer by layer art strips life bare.

― Robert Musil


Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

― Allen Ginsberg


Creativity is an act of defiance.

― Twyla Tharp


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 not in the eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

― Seth Godin


I don't think it was pain that made "Vincent Van Gogh" great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

― David Lynch


All great art is born of the metropolis.

― Ezra Pound


Every form of art is another way of seeing the world. Another perspective, another window. And science –that's the most spectacular window of all. You can see the entire universe from there.

― Claudia Gray


The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

― James Joyce


To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

― Henri Cartier-Bresson


You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.

― Viggo Mortensen


We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art - we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

― Anais Nin


The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

― Flannery O'Connor


I just do art because I'm ugly and there's nothing else for me to do.

― Andy Warhol


Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.

― Ann Patchett


Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it. At least that's how I felt about drawing.

― Meg Cabot


The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

― Rebecca Solnit


A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

― George Bernard Shaw


All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?

― Banksy


The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.

― Kate Chopin


A picture is worth a thousand words.

― Napoleon Bonaparte


Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

― Henry Ward Beecher


A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

― Richard Avedon


Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

― Vincent van Gogh


Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.

― Pablo Casals


My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.

― Claude Monet


If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb


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


The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

― G.K. Chesterton


People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish.... but that's only if it's done properly.

― Banksy


I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

― Claude Monet


Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

― Ayn Rand


The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson


Music gives color to the air of the moment.

― Karl Lagerfeld


Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

― Francois Truffaut


Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

― Carl Gustav Jung


In art as in love, instinct is enough.

― Anatole France


The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

― Orson Welles


Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

― Kurt Vonnegut


Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist.
To make living itself an art, that is the goal.

― Henry Miller


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


Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

― Charles Baudelaire


The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

― Pablo Picasso


An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

― Andy Warhol


In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

― Tom Robbins


We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

― Henry James


All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

― Oscar Wilde


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


Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

― Erich Fromm


Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

― Tom Hiddleston


Everyone tries to make his life a work of art.

― Albert Camus


What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

― John Updike


Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

― Pablo Picasso


The business of art lies just in this―to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

― Leo Tolstoy


Yoga is the art work of awareness on the canvas of body, mind, and soul.

― Amit Ray


To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.

― Author-Poet Aberjhani


Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.

― W. Somerset Maugham


Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

― Pablo Picasso


I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

― Oscar Wilde


Never judge a work of art by its defects.

― Washington Allston


Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.

― Donald E. Knuth


When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.

― John Fowles


Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

― Whoopi Goldberg


Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

― Albert Camus


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

― Edmond De Goncourt


Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

― George Eliot


If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

― Barbara Kingsolver


I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

― Philip Larkin


A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.

― Ansel Adams


All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

― Upton Sinclair


We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

― Ray Bradbury


Dreams are what guide us, art is what defines us, math is what makes it all possible, and love is what lights our way.

― Mike Norton


Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

― Alfred North Whitehead


The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

― Marcel Duchamp


The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

― Pablo Picasso


Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed.

― Brandon Sanderson


It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

― Oscar Wilde


Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

― Aldo Leopold


"When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning―human meaning, that is―is defined by them. You have to admit that."

― Margaret Atwood


All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

― John Ruskin


I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives.

― Lloyd Alexander


Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

― David Whyte


Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

― Pablo Picasso


Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.

― Kevin Smith


Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

― Aldous Huxley


Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.

― Kamand Kojouri


Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

― E. M. Forster


Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

― Charles Dickens


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


Art is either revolution or plagiarism

― Paul Gauguin


Art is anything you can get away with.

― Marshall McLuhan


Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

― Martin Amis


The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

― Michelle Obama


If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!

― Cath Crowley


What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

― Willa Cather


I do not want art for a few; any more than education for a few; or freedom for a few.

― William Morris


People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

― Salvador Dalí


Every true artist is at war with the world.

― Anthony Kiedis


Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

― Yann Martel


I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.

― Criss Jami


Some don't even watch art with their eyes nor with their mind, but with their ears, ever since they judge art by the sound of money.

― Erik Pevernagie


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


A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

― Louis Nizer


Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

― Chaim Potok


A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.

― Robert McKee


The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living.

― Dione Lucas


The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it.... try to fake three laughs in an hour - ha ha ha ha ha - they'll take you away, man. You can't.

― Lenny Bruce


What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.

― Claude Monet


Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation.... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce - render emotional - his audience, each time.

― Robert A. Heinlein


Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer, life imitates art.

― Lana Del Rey


Art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

― Andrei Tarkovsky


The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

― Robert Henri


Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

― Constantin Stanislavski


To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

― Pierre-Auguste Renoir


When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.

― Madeleine L'Engle


Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

― Kurt Vonnegut


A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

― Ansel Adams


Art begins.... when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

― Chaim Potok


You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, 'This is art, and you can't do it.'

― Steve Martin


The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

― Maxim Gorky


I remember growing up, saying you're an artist it sounds pretentious but now it's one of the only dignified things that you can call yourself.

― Marilyn Manson


A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

― Vladimir Nabokov


Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

― Andrei Tarkovsky


An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

― Kazuo Ishiguro


A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere.

― Ursula K. LeGuin


Art is science made clear.

― Jean Cocteau


To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.

― Marcel Duchamp


If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.

― Friedrich von Schiller


Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

― Stephen Sondheim


Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

― John Fowles


Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

― Eugene Delacroix


The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

― Federico García-Lorca


I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.

― Janet Fitch


art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They're like weeds, always finding their way up.

― V.E. Schwab


Art never comes from happiness.

― Chuck Palahniuk


Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.

― Wassily Kandinsky


Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

― William Butler Yeats


I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.

― Criss Jami


Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.

― Gary D. Schmidt


Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.

― Edgar Degas


I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

― Marcel Duchamp


The greatest art belongs to the world. Do not be intimidated by the experts. Trust your instincts. Do not be afraid to go against what you were taught, or what you were told to see or believe. Every person, every set of eyes, has the right to the truth.

― Blue Balliett


When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money

― Oscar Wilde


Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.

― Pierre-Auguste Renoir


Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

― Oscar Wilde


Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.

― Madeleine L'Engle


You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

― Maria Callas


Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

― Rene Magritte


Art is a process, not a product.

― MaryAnn kohl


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