148 Inspirational Quotes About Artists That Will Ignite Your Creativity

"If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint."

- Edward Hopper

"I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."

- Leonardo da Vinci

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

- Charles Horton Cooley

"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

"Creativity takes courage."

- Henri Matisse

"To create one's own world takes courage."

- Georgia O'Keeffe

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

- Henry Moore

"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

"The only time I feel alive is when I'm painting."

- Vincent van Gogh

"I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Inspiration does exist but it must find you working."

- Pablo Picasso

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"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

"I dream of painting and then I paint my dream."

- Vincent van Gogh

"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

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."

- Pablo Picasso

"To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist."

- Robert Schumann

"All art requires courage."

- Anne Tucker

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."

- Michelangelo

"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

"I dream my paintings, and then they paint my dream."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art."

- Leonardo DaVinci

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."

- Francis Bacon

"It is important to express oneself...provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience."

- Berthe Morisot

"Every good painter paints what he is."

- Jackson Pollock

"In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing."

- Georgia O'Keeffe

"Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing."

- Marc Chagall

"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

"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

"There is no must in art because art is free."

- Wassily Kandinsky

"Painting is a means of self-enlightenment."

- John Olsen

"I don't say everything, but I paint everything."

- Pablo Picasso

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."

- Aristotle

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."

- Oscar Wilde

"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."

- Stella Adler

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free"

- Michelangelo

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

- James McNeill Whistler

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

- Scott Adams

"The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech."

- Vincent van Gogh

"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

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

- Pablo Picasso

"As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward."

- Vincent van Gogh

"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."

- Robert Henri

"Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something."

- Rainbow Rowell

"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents."

- Bob Ross

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."

- Thomas Merton

"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

- Pablo Picasso

"The purpose of art is to make the invisible visible."

- Paul Klee

"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 is the highest form of hope."

- Gerhard Richter

"Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist."

- Edward Hopper

"Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk."

- Mark Rothko

"You can't use up creativity. The more the you use, the more you have."

- Maya Angelou

"A drawing is simply a line going for a walk."

- Paul Klee

"Art is a way of recognizing oneself."

- Louise Bourgeois

"Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced."

- Leo Tolstoy

"The world always seems brighter when you've just made something that wasn't there before."

- Neil Gaiman

"Art is the journey of a free soul."

- Alev Oguz

"Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further."

- Keith Haring

"The artist's job is to be a light in the darkness and a voice in the silence."

- Oscar Wilde

"The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness."

- Anni Albers

"Have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it."

- Salvador Dali

"Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment."

- Claude Monet

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

- Twyla Tharp

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth."

- Pablo Picasso

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Do not fear mistakes - there are none."

- Miles David

"There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Art is not a thing; it is a way."

- Elbert Hubbard

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

- Pablo Picasso

"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."

- Edgar Degas

"Great art picks up where nature ends."

- Marc Chagall

"An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it."

- Paul Valéry

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

- George Bernard Shaw

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

- Piet Mondrian

"The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live."

- Auguste Rodin

"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

"Don't be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation."

- Paul Cezanne

"A Good artist has less time than ideas."

- Martin Kippenberger

"Art is the stored honey of the human soul."

- Theodore Dreiser

"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."

- Jean Jacques Rousseau

"A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places."

- Paul Gardner

"If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses preceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul."

- Paul Cezanne

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."

- Andre Gide

"I would rather die of passion than of boredom."

- Vincent van Gogh

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

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Everything you can imagine is real."

- Pablo Picasso

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"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

"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

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, 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."

- Anaïs Nin

"Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."

- Chuck Klosterman

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

- Oscar Wilde

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."

- Cesar Cruz

"The painter has the universe in his mind and hands."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"Art is the language of the soul."

- Claudia Moscovici

"Art is a line around your thoughts."

- Gustav Klimt

"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."

- Oscar Wilde

"Art is a way of understanding and interpreting the world."

- Kiki Smith

"Art is a conversation with the world."

- Mariell Amélie

"Art is the longing of the soul for something better than itself."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence."

- Henri Matisse

"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

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."

- Henry David Thoreau

"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

"I wish they would only take me as I am."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Art is never finished, only abandoned"

- Leonardo da Vinci

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

- Robert Hughes

"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands."

- Michelangelo

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"To create something exceptional, your mindset must be relentlessly focused on the smallest detail."

- Giorgio Armani

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

- Michelangelo

"Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet."

- Paul Klee

"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it."

- Andy Warhol

"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."

- John W. Gardner

"I invent nothing, I rediscover."

- Auguste Rodin

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

- George Bernard Shaw

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done."

- Vincent van Gogh

"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

"A great artist is always before his time or behind it."

- George Moore

"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

"Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life."

- Karl Lagerfeld

"If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."

- Salvador Dali

"The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real."

- Lucian Freud

"Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul."

- Edvard Munch

"One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh."

- Georges Rouault

"If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle."

- Albrecht Durer

"Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God."

- Rembrandt van Rijn

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

- Albert Einstein

"All art is but imitation of nature."

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"The opposite of play is not work - it is depression."

- Dr. Stuart Brown

"Play is the highest form of research."

- Albert Einstein

"You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat."

- Pierre Auguste Renoir

"Art is the signature of civilizations."

- Beverly Sills

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

- Dr. Seuss

"Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy."

- Vincent van Gogh

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

- Andy Warhol

"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."