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