Aching for art quotes?
Awesome! According to Twyla Tharp, Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
And who couldn’t use a bit of that now and then?
So let’s get inspired with these:
- Quotes about art.
- Art quotes about life.
- Art quotes for and about kids.
- Artist quotes about art, from Picasso, Van Gogh, and many more.
- Art quotes short and sweet, to tweet or make picture quotes.
Ready to inspire your inner artist, and others’ as well? Let’s get started!
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Quotes about art
A picture is worth a thousand words.
~Napoleon Bonaparte
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
~Oscar Wilde
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
~Albert Camus
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
~Friedrich Nietzsche
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
~Aristotle
A picture is a poem without words.
~Horace
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
~Twyla Tharp
A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.
~Hedy Lamarr
Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.
~Khalil Gibran
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
~Oscar Wilde
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
~Thomas Merton
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
~Oscar Wilde
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
~Gertrude Stein
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
~Charlie Chaplin
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.
~Charles Horton Cooley
Art quotes about life
This world is but a canvas to our imagination.
~Henry David Thoreau
Art is the proper task of life.
~Friedrich Nietzsche
You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them.
~Shonda Rhimes
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
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
~Friedrich Nietzsche
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
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
~Stella Adler
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
~George Bernard Shaw
Art quotes for and about kids
Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.
~Al Hirschfeld
Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else.
~Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.
~David Hockney
Our task, regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains, as high as possible. No one can do more.
~Loris Malaguzzi
Creativity is an area in which younger people have a tremendous advantage, since they have an endearing habit of always questioning past wisdom and authority.”
~Bill Hewlett
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
~Pablo Picasso
It takes a very long time to become young.
~Pablo Picasso
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?”
~Howard Ikemoto
Pablo Picasso art quotes
There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.
~Pablo Picasso
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
~Pablo Picasso
We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
~Pablo Picasso
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
~Pablo Picasso
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
~Pablo Picasso
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
~Pablo Picasso
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
I don’t say everything, but I paint everything.
~Pablo Picasso
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
Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.
~Pablo Picasso
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
~Pablo Picasso
Vincent Van Gogh art quotes
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
I dream my painting and then paint my dream.
~Vincent Van Gogh
All these months I’ve been trying to find find a pattern. Trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people.
~Vincent Van Gogh
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
~Vincent Van Gogh
Leonardo da Vinci art quotes
Painting is a poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.
~Leonardo da Vinci
Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.
~Leonardo da Vinci
The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.
~Leonardo da Vinci
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
~Leonardo da Vinci
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
~Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo art quotes
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
~Michelangelo
A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it.
~Michelangelo
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
~Michelangelo
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
~Michelangelo
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
~Michelangelo
If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
~Michelangelo
Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.
~Michelangelo
Auguste Rodin art quotes
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.
~Auguste Rodin
What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.
~Auguste Rodin
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
~Auguste Rodin
Art quotes by artists
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
~James McNeill Whistler
What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
~Eugene Delacroix
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
~Edgar Degas
I just feel that I’m in tune with the right vibrations in the universe when I’m in the process of working.
~Louise Nevelson
Art must be life — it must belong to everybody.
~Marina Abramović
There is no must in art because art is free.
~Wassily Kandinsky
Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.
~Roy Lichtenstein
The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
~Francis Bacon
When I feel a little confused the only thing to do is to turn back to the study of nature before launching once again into the subjects closest to heart.
~Raoul Dufy
Do you know when you’re favorite artist was born? Check the famous artist birthdays list!
In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.
~Kai Greene
If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.
~Edward Hopper
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
An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
~Henry Miller
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
~Giorgio DeChirico
As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.
~James McNeill Whistler
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
~Camille Pissarro
I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.
~William Morris
The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.
~Thomas Eakins
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
Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.
~Millard Sheets
I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
~Joan Miro
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
~Anselm Kiefer
The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.
~Piet Mondrian
The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.
~Kapil Gupta
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
~Edgar Degas
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
~Marc Chagall
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realising one’s sensations.
~Paul Cezanne
A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun, an event first and only secondarily an image.
~Elaine de Kooning
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
~Jackson Pollock
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
~Edgar Degas
All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.
~Bob Ross
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
~Henri Matisse
Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
~Salvador Dali
I shut my eyes in order to see.
~Paul Gauguin
The painting has a life of its own.
~Jackson Pollock
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
~Rene Magritte
Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.
~Louise Nevelson
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
~Paul Cezanne
I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.
~Frida Kahlo
A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
~Salvador Dali
Conclusion
If you like these art quotes, I bet you’ll also like my collection of creativity quotes.
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