Inspiring Quotes That Celebrate the Arts

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

- Paul Klee

"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

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

- Pablo Picasso

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

- Albert Einstein

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

- Michelangelo

"Great art picks up where nature ends."

- Marc Chagall

"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

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

- George Bernard Shaw

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

- Vincent van Gogh

"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

"If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing."

- Marc Chagall

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

- Frida Kahlo

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

- Wassily Kandinsky

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

- Twyla Tharp

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

- Aristotle

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

- Stella Adler

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

- Vincent van Gogh

"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

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

- Pablo Picasso

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

- Albrecht Durer

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

- Pablo Picasso

"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

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

- Jean Jacques Rousseau

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

- Robert Henri

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

- Vincent van Gogh

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

- Henry Ward Beecher

"The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense."

- Pablo Picasso

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

- Elbert Hubbard

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

- Elbert Hubbard

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

- 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

"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

"Art provides an opportunity for kaleidoscopic thinking. Each time we shift the lens of our perceptions, we gain new perspectives — and new opportunities for innovation."

- Linda Naiman

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

- Friedrich Nietzsche

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

- Pablo Picasso

"The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music."

- Rabindranath Tagore

"The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but that you can become."

- Ken Wilber

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."

- Pablo Picasso

"This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

- Henry David Thoreau

"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

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

- Winston Churchill

"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others."

- Jonathan Swift

"No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language."

- Theodore Bikel

"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

"There is nothing new in art except talent."

- Anton Chekhov

"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still."

- Dorothea Lange

"Rules and models destroy genius and art."

- William Hazlitt

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."

- Walt Whitman

"To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity."

- Lewis Mumford

"What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space."

- David Hockney

"You don't take a photograph, you make it."

- Ansel Adams

"The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class."

- Louis Dudek

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

- Scott Adams

"A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires."

- Hedy Lamarr

"If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."

- John F. Kennedy

"Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."

- Marcel Proust

"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs."

- Thomas Wolfe

"The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart."

- George Sand

"I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."

- Jackson Pollock

"Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos."

- Stephen Sondheim

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

- Thomas Merton

"The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique."

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor."

- Andre Gide

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

- Claude Monet

"One eye sees, the other feels."

- Paul Klee

"Painting is by nature a luminous language."

- Robert Delaunay

"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."

- Ambrose Bierce

"What is art but a way of seeing?"

- Saul Bellow

"All art is but imitation of nature."

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

- Edgar Degas

"With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft."

- Henri Matisse

"I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies."

- Le Corbusier

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

- Francis Bacon

"A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas."

- Charles Dudley Warner

"To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing."

- Philip Guston

"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it."

- Ernst Fischer

"Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible."

- Balthus

"Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love."

- Alfred Sisley

"Art must take reality by surprise."

- Francoise Sagan

"Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad."

- Salvador Dali

"I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota."

- Gustave Courbet

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

- Leo Tolstoy

"An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose."

- Langston Hughes

"I don't believe in art. I believe in artists."

- Marcel Duchamp

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."

- Charles Bukowski

"A picture is a poem without words."

- Horace

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

- Michelangelo

"When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination."

- Ellen Key

"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."

- Iris Murdoch

"Photography is a major force in explaining man to man."

- Edward Steichen

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

- Michelangelo

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

- Edvard Munch

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

- James McNeill Whistler

"Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely."

- Edward Albee

"Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

- Andy Warhol

"What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit."

- John Updike

"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

"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

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

- Pablo Picasso

"To create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage."

- Georgia O'Keeffe

"I paint myself because I am alone. I paint myself because I am the subject I know best."

- Frida Kahlo

"The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?"

- Pablo Picasso

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

- Paul Valéry

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

- Vincent van Gogh

"Art is a line around your thoughts."

- Gustav Klimt

"Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together."

- John Ruskin

"Art is never finished, only abandoned."

- Leonardo da Vinci

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

- Leonardo DaVinci

"never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Art that cannot shape society and therefore also cannot penetrate the heart questions of society, and in the end influence the question of capital, is no art."

- Joseph Beuys

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

- Paul Cézanne

"Art is meant to disturb, science reassures."

- Georges Braque

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

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

- Joseph Campbell

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

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

- Oscar Wilde

"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

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

- Charles Horton Cooley

"The primary benefit of practising any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"All art requires courage."

- Anne Tucker

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

- Oscar Wilde

"I would like to paint the way a bird sings."

- Claude Monet

"Painting is a means of self-enlightenment."

- John Olsen

"Everything depends on the attitude of the artist toward his subject. It is essential."

- Robert Henri

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

- William Blake

"I invent nothing, I rediscover."

- 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

"The day is an empty canvas, the shapes and colors are yours to choose."

- Alex Noble

"I dream a lot. I do more painting when I’m not painting. It’s in the subconscious."

- Andrew Wyeth

"An artist is like a prophet. He must lead people and help them get acquainted with what he sees."

- George Butendorp

"A good artist has less time than ideas."

- Martin Kippenberger

"That stroke you are about to make on a painting is as much you as the next word you utter or the next breath you take."

- Harley Brown

"The only time I am truly in the Now is when I paint."

- Lori McNee

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

- Schumman

"Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money."

- Ernst Levy

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

- Andy Warhol

"Artists are fiery, they do not weep!"

- Ludwig van Beethoven

"Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish."

- Balthus

"When inspiration doesn’t come, I go halfway to meet it."

- Freud

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who can’t attain it in anything."

- Eugene Delacroix

"I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also, I have to earn my living, and occupy myself."

- Francis Bacon

"The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is."

- Alfred Tonnelle

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

"A picture is worth a thousand words."