Creativity Quotes

"Creativity takes courage."

- Henri Matisse

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

- Pablo Picasso

"The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel."

- Piet Mondrian

"The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity."

- Alberto Giacometti

"To be an artist is to believe in life."

- Henry Moore

"Every good painter paints what he is."

- Jackson Pollock

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

- Edgar Degas

"I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality."

- Frida Kahlo

"A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art."

- Paul Cézanne

"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."

- Twyla Tharp

"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."

- Charles Horton Cooley

"An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision."

- James McNeill Whistler

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

- Pablo Picasso

"Art is magical, but it’s not magic. It’s a neurological product, and we can study this neurological product the same way we study other complex processes such as language."

- Charles Limb

"Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

- Scott Adams

"The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. Art is the transforming experience."

- Joseph Campbell

"Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting."

- Winston Churchill

"The artist has one function–to affirm and glorify life."

- W. Edward Brown

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."

- Berthold Brecht

"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers."

- James Baldwin

"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures."

- Henry Ward Beecher

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

- William Blake

"Art is meant to disturb, science reassures."

- Georges Braque

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life."

- Boris Pasternak

"Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction."

- Pablo Picasso

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."

- Michelangelo

"Art-making has an alchemical effect on the imagination. It awakens the senses and sharpens insights, teaching us to think in symbols, metaphors, and to de-code complexity, so we can perceive the world in new ways."

- Linda Naiman