There’s no way I could deliver a better quote when my competitors are only the most intelligent, world-renowned artists whose works hang on the walls of the most famous museums and galleries all over the world. Although art can sometimes seem like a purely decorative thing, there’s always a hidden meaning or an emotion lurking under the facade. And, of course, to create such a thought and emotion-evoking work of art, one should definitely have some pretty deep sulcus in their brain or an enviable ability to tap right into the subconscious. Sounds intriguing? Well then, why not check out what artists had to say about their creations in these art quotes? Surely, these are only the documented cases because we do not doubt that some of these virtuosos always spoke in cryptic riddles and smart euphemisms that just haven’t been written down by anybody.
Now, I don’t know who said it, but by far my own most beloved art quote is this one – ‘Everybody’s an artist, but only artists know it.’ Isn’t it just grand? It proves right on that I’m, indeed, no artist because I have no recognition of my artistic talents, especially when it comes to drawing and even worse with dancing. So maybe it’s best to leave the job to the people born to become famous artists, and it would also be a good idea to not try to top their wise words with our own.
Ready for some inspiring quotes that might just uproot your world? The art quotes are just a paintbrush stroke down below, but the courage to read them has to come from within. So, buckle up, open your mind and soak in these truly awe-inspiring words. Once your heart skips a beat reading the quotes by, say, Keith Haring, Rembrandt, or Gustav Klimt – give those phrases your vote. Also, be sure to share this article with your friends who might just be suffering from a creative block. While we cannot promise that these artists’ quotes will open up their chakras, we can all give it a try, at the very least!
#1
“We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.” — Bob Ross
#2
“Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse
#3
“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.” – Salvador Dalí
#4
“The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.“― Leonardo da Vinci
#5
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” ― Pablo Picasso
#6
“Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.“― Rembrandt
#7
“I shut my eyes in order to see.” – Paul Gauguin
#8
“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.“― Ernest Hemingway
#9
“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
#10
“Art is like therapy; what comes up is what comes up. It may be dark, but that’s what comes up. You may want to keep some of it in a drawer… but never judge it.” ― Nick Bantock
#11
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.“― Pablo Picasso
#12
“He who works with his hands is a labourer. 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
#13
“Making art is the most relaxing, joyous, therapeutic stimulating way to spend your time, as you unleash the part of your brain that’s been itching to get at it.“― Harley Brown
#14
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” – Pablo Picasso
#15
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.“― Chuck Close
#16
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.“― Pablo Picasso
#17
“If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.“― Michelangelo
#18
“Success is a worn down pencil.” — Robert Rauschenberg
#19
“Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.“― Salvador Dali
#20
“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.” ― David Bowie
#21
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.“― Oscar Wilde
#22
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” – Michelangelo
#23
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.“― Pablo Picasso
#24
“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.“― Joan Miro
#25
“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.“― Neil Gaiman
#26
“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.“― Friedrich Nietzsche
#27
“I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.“― David Lynch
#28
“Art is a line around your thoughts.” – Gustav Klimt
#29
“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” — Edward Hopper
#30
“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.” — Leonardo da Vinci
#31
“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
#32
“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.” – Edgar Degas
#33
“The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.“― Kapil Gupta
#34
“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.“― Neil Gaiman
#35
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” ― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
#36
“Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.” – Keith Haring
#37
“Every artist was first an amateur.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
#38
“To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them.” ― Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#39
“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.“― Salvador Dali
#40
“Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.” ― Al Hirschfeld
#41
“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.“― Anais Nin
#42
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.“― Ray Bradbury
#43
“Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory.“― David Gentleman
#44
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.“― Henry Ward Beecher
#45
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” ― Albert Einstein
#46
“It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.“― Paul Cezanne
#47
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.“― Kurt Vonnegut
#48
“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” – Frida Kahlo
#49
“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
#50
“There is no must in art because art is free.“― Wassily Kandinsky
#51
“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.“― Leo Tolstoy
#52
“I paint flowers so they will not die.“― Frida Kahlo
#53
“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.” ― Joan Miro
#54
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.“― Scott Adams
#55
“Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.“― Dale Carnegie
#56
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” – Oscar Wilde
#57
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
#58
“When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.“ ― Edvard Munch
#59
“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.“― Jackson Pollock
#60
“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.“― Charles Cooley
#61
“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don’t see a different purpose for it now.” ― Dorothea Tanning
#62
“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte
#63
“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” — Ansel Adams
#64
“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
#65
“The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was ‘beauty’. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile.“― Roger Scruton
#66
“Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.“― Marc Davis
#67
“The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.” ― Stanley Kubrick
#68
“Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self-image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them.“― Tyler Cowen
#69
“Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality.“― John Dewey
#70
“To be an artist is to believe in life.” – Henry Moore
#71
“Great art picks up where nature ends.” – Marc Chagall
#72
“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” — Auguste Rodin
#73
“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
#74
“A true masterpiece does not tell everything.“― Albert Camus
#75
“Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colours flowers, so does art colour life.“― John Lubbock
#76
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.“― Aristotle
#77
“Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.” ― Kimon Nicolaides
#78
“One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.“― Balthus
#79
“Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.“― John Berger
#80
“Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.“― Pablo Picasso
#81
“The power of nature is such that it’s what all art strives to be. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship.” ― Rick Rubin
#82
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.“― Robert Hughes
#83
“The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.”― Norman Rockwell
#84
“Art has many avenues; love is carried through many vessels. Your oceans are your colours, your ship is your brush and your treasures are in your heart.“― Moncy Barbour
#85
“The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” – George Inness
#86
“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
#87
“I have a flood of ideas in my mind. I just follow my vision.” – Yayoi Kusama
#88
“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
#89
“If you as a designer don’t believe in your design and don’t see it beyond the context of the film, instead of as a real creature in a real world then how can you expect the audience to believe it?” ― Peter Jackson
#90
“I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.“― Bob Ross
#91
“Anything I can not transform into something marvellous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.“― Anais Nin
#92
“It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.“― J. M. W. Turner
#93
“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.“― Marc Chagall
#94
“Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see.” ― Edgar Degas
#95
“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.“― Georgia O’Keeffe
#96
“The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.“― Wassily Kandinsky
#97
“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.“― Eric Gill
#98
“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.“― Susan Sontag
#99
“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” ― Keith Haring
#100
“Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence.“― Henri Matisse
#101
“It is not enough to know your craft, you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.“― Edouard Manet
#102
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.“― Frida Kahlo
#103
“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.” – Louise Bourgeois
#104
“To my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link.” — Paul Cézanne
#105
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.“― Henry David Thoreau
#106
“For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.“― Brian Froud
#107
“An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.” ― Michelangelo
#108
“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
#109
“When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a ‘get acquainted period’ that I see what I’ve been about.“― Jackson Pollock
#110
“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.” ― Keith Haring
#111
“It’s not in the draftsmanship, it’s in the man. Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. It’s in the man. If you want to do it, you do it.”― Jack Kirby
#112
“The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.” ― Agnes Martin
#113
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
#114
“Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.“― Anselm Kiefer
#115
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.“― Stella Adler
#116
“How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it.“― Juliette Aristides
#117
“What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.” ― Claude Monet
#118
“In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.“― Kai Greene
#119
“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
#120
“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
#121
“Personality is everything in art and poetry.“― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#122
“When you do things for their own sake, that’s when you create your best work. That’s when it’s art.“― Naval Ravikant
#123
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.“― William Faulkner
#124
“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.“― Susan Sontag
#125
“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
#126
“Art is too important not to share.”― Romero Britto
#127
“I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.”― Roy Lichtenstein
#128
“There is no word for art. We say it is to transfer something from the real to the unreal. I am an owl, and I am a happy owl. I like to make people happy and everything happy. I am the light of happiness and I am a dancing owl.“― Kenojuak Ashevak
#129
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.“― Bertolt Brecht
#130
“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” — Jerzy Kosinski
#131
“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.” – Claude Monet
#132
“If the artist has outer and inner eyes for nature, nature rewards him by giving him inspiration.” – Wassily Kandinsky
#133
“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.“ ― Paul Cezanne
#134
“My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.“
― Peter Falk
#135
“Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realizing one’s sensations.” ― Paul Cezanne
#136
“Drawing is vision on paper.“― Andrew Loomis
#137
“It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character.“― Camille Pissarro
#138
“Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.“― Georges Braque
#139
“One who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color with another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinite variety of images.”― Sonia Delaunay
#140
“In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.” ― George Bridgman
#141
“Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.“― David Hockney
#142
“Our primary function is to create an emotion and our secondary function is to sustain that emotions.“― Alfred Hitchcock
#143
“I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.” – Jean-Michel Basquiat
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