Quotes About Art

Awesome Quotes and Sayings About Art

Quotations & Citations:

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

~ Pablo Picasso

 

 

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

~ John Ruskin

 

 

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

~ Leonardo da Vinci

 

 

Art is Man’s nature. Nature is God’s art.

~ James Bailey

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier.

~ Marie Laurencin

 

 

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

 

 

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

~ G.K. Chesterton

 

 

 

 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

~ Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

 

 

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

~ Walter Gropius

 

 

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, Days of Magic, Nights of War

 

 

 

Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.

~ Jules Feiffer

 

 

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

 

 

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

 

 

 

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

~ Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

 

 

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God’s grandchild.

~ Dante Alighieri

 

 

I dream my painting and I paint my dream.
~ Vincent van Gogh

 

 

Art is art, even when unsuccessful.

~ Danish Proverb

 

 

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

~ Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

 

 

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

~ Aristotle

 

 

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

 

 

My inspiration is art… because without art, we would just be stuck with reality.

~ Daniel R. Lynch

 

 

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.
~ Woody Allen

 

 

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

~ Pablo Picasso

 

 

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

~ Edgar Degas

 

 

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt.

~ Odilon Redon

 

 

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

 

 

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

~ Claes Oldenburg

 

 

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, Mere Christianity

 

 

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

 

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

~ Karl Lagerfeld

 

 

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

~ George Moore

 

 

We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.

~ Bob Ross

 

 

Art is a kind of illness.

~ Giacomo Puccini

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one.

~ William McElcheran

 

 

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

~ Oscar Wilde

 

 

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.

~ Oscar Wilde

 

 

 

I want to meet a guy named Art. I’d take him to a museum, hang him on the wall, criticize him, and leave.

~ Jarod Kintz, I Want

 

 

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

~ Paul Valéry

 

 

 

There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
~ Vincent van Gogh

 

 

The artist is a receptacle for the 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

 

 

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 thing; it is a way.

~ Elbert Hubbard

 

 

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

 

 

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

~ Lincoln Steffens

 

 

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

 

 

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

~ George Santayana

 

 

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, Life of Pi

 

 

 

What was any art but a mold in which 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

 

 

Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh… now you tell me what you know.

~ Groucho Marx

 

 

Picasso is not our greatest painter, but he is our greatest artist. He’s the great satyr art figure. His whole life is a work of art.

~ Leonard Baskin

 

 

The human body is the best work of art.
~ Jess C. Scott

 

 

Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that initiates art.

~ Martin H. Fischer

 

 

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

~ Leonardo da Vinci

 

 

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

~ W. Somerset Maugham

 

 

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

 

 

Coloring outside the lines is a fine art.

~ Kim Nance

 

 

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

~ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

~ Loren Eiseley

 

 

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.
~ Pablo Picasso

 

 

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

~ John Lubbock

 

 

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

~ Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

 

 

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

~ Augustus Saint-Gaudens

 

 

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, Saving June

 

 

Art hath an enemy called ignorance.

~ Ben Jonson

 

 

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

~ Pablo Picasso

 

 

One of the best things about paintings is their silence — which prompts reflection and random reverie.

~ Mark Stevens

 

 

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, Franny and Zooey

 

 

Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.

~ Jean Paul Richter

 

 

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

 

 

All great art comes from a sense of outrage.

~ Glenn Close

 

 

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

~ Vincent van Gogh

 

 

Art is the proper task of life.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

 

 

Art is the triumph over chaos.

~ John Cheever

 

 

The first step – especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money – the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

 

 

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

~ Pablo Picasso

 

 

Nature is a haunted house–but Art–is a house that tries to be haunted.
~ Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems

 

 

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

~ John Anthony Ciardi

 

 

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

 

 

Art is… a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what’s happening.

~ Aaron Howard

 

 

All art is quite useless.

~ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

 

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

~ Georges Rouault

 

 

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.
~ Ansel Adams

 

 

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

~ John Updike

 

 

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

 

 

Great art picks up where nature ends.

~ Marc Chagall

 

 

 

Art is what you can get away with.

~ Andy Warhol

 

 

Art holds fast when all else is lost.

~ German Proverb

 

 

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

 

 

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

~ Edgar Degas

 

 

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

~ Danny Kaye

 

 

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

~ Schumann

 

 

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

~ Stella Adler

 

 

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 should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

~ Banksy

 

 

Painting is silent poetry.

~ Plutarch

 

 

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.

~ Francis of Assisi

 

 

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

~ Pablo Picasso