Art Quotes
Welcome to Art Quotes. Here you will find famous quotes and quotations about arts.
Art Quotes and Quotations
A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires. ~Hedy Lamarr
A great artist is always before his time or behind it. ~George Moore
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. ~Albert Camus
A man and his art are like a fool and his king. ~Terri Guillemets
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. ~Michelangelo
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
A painting is what you make of it, besides which, 'Moon, Weeping' has a better ring to it than 'Paintbrush, Dripping.' ~Robert Brault
A picture is a poem without words. ~Horace
A picture is worth a thousand words. ~Napoleon Bonaparte
A portrait has one advantage over its original: it is unconscious; and you may therefore admire without insulting it. I have seen portraits which have more. ~Augustus William
Art Quotes and Quotations
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds. ~Henry Moore
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. ~Oscar Wilde
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. ~Oscar Wilde
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. ~Gertrude Stein
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. ~Al Capp
Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. ~Marshall McLuhan
Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. ~Marshall McLuhan
All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography. ~Federico Fellini
All art is but imitation of nature. ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker
Art Quotes and Quotations
All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~Glenn Close
All the other colors are just colors, but purple seems to have a soul. Purple is not just a noun and an adjective but also a verb - when you look at it, it's looking back at you. ~Uniek Swain
An art critic is someone who appreciates art, except for any particular piece of art. ~Robert Brault
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley
An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. ~Jean Cocteau
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. ~George Santayana
An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. ~Henry Miller
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. ~James Whistler
An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. ~Andy Warhol
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 Quotes and Quotations
An artist must be careful not to throw his ideas out with the trash. ~Terri Guillemets
An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it. ~Paul Valery
An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler
Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ~Leonard Bernstein
Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. ~Wynetka Ann Reynolds
Architecture begins where engineering ends. ~Walter Gropius
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art disturbs, science reassures. ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit
Art Quotes and Quotations
Art doesn't have to matter to a lot of people to matter a lot. ~Jeb Dickerson
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. ~Thomas Merton
Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. ~Frank Lloyd Wright
Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~Ben Jonson
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. ~Andre Gide
Art is a kind of illness. ~Giacomo Puccini
Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate. ~Andre Malraux
Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys... every line has its own meaning. ~Sarah
Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. ~Khalil Gibran
Art is an adventure that never seems to end. ~Jason
Art Quotes and Quotations
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. ~Paul Gauguin
Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. ~Jean Paul Richter
Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. ~Lincoln Steffens
Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art. ~James Bailey
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth. ~John Ruskin
Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~Elbert Hubbard
Art is pictures straight from the heart. ~Ben
Art is spirituality in drag. ~Jennifer Yane
Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. ~Meghan
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 Quotes and Quotations
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. ~Oscar Wilde
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~Twyla Tharp
Art is the proper task of life. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. ~Theodore Dreiser
Art is the struggle to understand. ~Terri Guillemets
Art is the triumph over chaos. ~John Cheever
Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer. ~Terri Guillemets
Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination. ~Devin
Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page. ~Sara
Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening. ~Aaron Howard
Art Quotes and Quotations
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time. ~Jean Cocteau
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
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon. ~Agnes Repplier
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. ~Willa Cather
Artistry is an innate distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the five senses. ~Robert Brault
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
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. ~Gustave Flaubert
As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. ~Pablo Picasso
As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~John Lubbock
Art Quotes and Quotations
But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker
Coloring outside the lines is a fine art. ~Kim Nance
Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. ~Salvador Dali
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Every artist was first an amateur. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
Every good painter paints what he is. ~Jackson Pollock
Art Quotes and Quotations
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. ~W. Somerset Maugham
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse. ~Francis Bacon
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ~John Ruskin
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault
For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one. ~William McElcheran
God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things. ~Pablo Picasso
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. ~George Jean Nathan
Art Quotes and Quotations
Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ~Claes Oldenburg
I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. ~Henri Matisse
I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good. ~Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
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
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~Henri Matisse
You don't take a photograph, you make it. ~Ansel Adams
If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have been wallpapered. ~Robin Tyler
If one looks closely enough, one can see angels in every piece of art. ~Terri Guillemets
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. ~Honore de Balzac
Art Quotes and Quotations
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. ~Anais Nin
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'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. ~Andy Warhol
In art as in love, instinct is enough. ~Anatole France
In art the best is good enough. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. ~Henry Moore
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. ~Loren Eiseley
Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. ~Igor Stravinsky
Art Quotes and Quotations
Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~Stella Adler
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. ~Oscar Wilde
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. ~Jean Cocteau
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. ~Gilbert K. Chesterton
Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money. ~Ernst Levy
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. ~John Anthony Ciardi
My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art. ~Clara Schumann
My inspiration is art... because without art, we would just be stuck with reality. ~Daniel R. Lynch
Art Quotes and Quotations
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. ~Ansel Adams
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. ~Winston Churchill
One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie. ~Mark Stevens
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. ~Salvador Dali
Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. ~Edgar Degas
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ~Pablo Picasso
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci
Painting is silent poetry. ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. ~Ambrose Bierce
Art Quotes and Quotations
Personality is everything in art and poetry. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. ~Ambrose Bierce
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. ~Dorothea Lange
Picasso would give up cubism just to capture your curves. ~Konfal Blyther
Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art Quotes and Quotations
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that initiates art. ~Martin H. Fischer
Rules and models destroy genius and art. ~William Hazlitt
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres. ~Oscar Wilde
So vast is art, so narrow human wit. ~Alexander Pope
Art Quotes and Quotations
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun. ~Pablo Picasso
Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea. ~Robert Brault
Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~Aristotle
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
Art Quotes and Quotations
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. ~Walt Whitman
The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is. ~Alfred Tonnelle
The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality. ~Robert Brault
The artist is a receptacle for 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
Art Quotes and Quotations
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. ~Emile Zola
The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller
The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist. ~Robert Brault
The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair. ~Robert Brault
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
Art Quotes and Quotations
The beginning is the most important part of the work. ~Plato
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment. ~David Herbert Lawrence
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~Kenneth Tynan
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. ~Dale Carnegie
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Art Quotes and Quotations
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. ~Thomas Carlyle
The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else. ~Robert Brault
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person. ~Abraham Lincoln
The history of art is the history of revivals. ~Samuel Butler
The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Art Quotes and Quotations
The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. ~Robert Brault
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ~T.S. Eliot
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. ~Pablo Picasso
The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. ~James Russell Lowell
The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination. ~Elbert Hubbard
Art Quotes and Quotations
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. ~André Malraux
The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~Pablo Picasso
There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination. ~Robert Brault
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. ~Pablo Picasso
There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Art Quotes and Quotations
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. ~Ansel Adams
This world is but a canvas to our imagination. ~Henry David Thoreau
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. ~E. M. Forster
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. ~Henri Cartier-Bresson
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it. ~Leo Tolstoy
Art Quotes and Quotations
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. ~Schumann
Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first. ~Arthur Schopenhauer
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. ~Michelangelo
True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. ~Albert Einstein
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
Art Quotes and Quotations
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. ~Jonathan Swift
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
We have art in order not to die of the truth. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Art Quotes and Quotations
What was any art but a mould 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
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. ~Paul Cezanne
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 at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto
When painting, an artist must take care not to trap his soul in the canvas. ~Terri Guillemets
Art Quotes and Quotations
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt. ~Odilon Redon
Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier. ~Marie Laurencin
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. ~Albert Camus
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