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Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,
and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing
which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ~Pablo Picasso
Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~Twyla Tharp
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
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist
once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you
have one. ~Stella Adler
Painting is silent poetry. ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is
painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci
It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and
beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita
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
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty
of the artist. ~Schumann
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
I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
~Henri Matisse
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton
Cooley
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner
vision and its ultimate expression. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
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, Two Cheers
for Democracy, 1951
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of
misery and travail. ~Theodore Dreiser, Life, Art, and America, 1917
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
All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the
artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde
Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when
you do. ~Edgar Degas
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
Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the
artist does the better. ~André Gide
Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. ~Wynetka
Ann Reynolds
But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone
else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker
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
Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall
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
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture
is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
~John Updike
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
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he
would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde
Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown
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 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
God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night,
a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault
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
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual
extinction of personality. ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual
Talent, 1919
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 is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know
what's happening. ~Aaron Howard
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
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
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
The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures
that do? ~Pablo Picasso
When painting, an artist must take care not to trap his soul in the
canvas. ~Dena Groquet
I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a
picture. ~Henri Matisse, Notes d'un peintre, 1908
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own
loveliness. ~George Jean Nathan, House of Satan
Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. ~Meghan, Los
Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and
emotions on a page. ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
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, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination. ~Devin, Los
Cerros Middle School, 1999
Art is an adventure that never seems to end. ~Jason, Los Cerros
Middle School, 1999
Art is pictures straight from the heart. ~Ben, Los Cerros Middle
School, 1999
If Michelangelo had been straight, the Sistine Chapel would have
been wallpapered. ~Robin Tyler
Art is the triumph over chaos. ~John Cheever
All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~Glenn Close
Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. ~Jean Paul Richter
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad,
and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. ~Gilbert Keith
Chesterton, Orthodoxy
One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which
prompts reflection and random reverie. ~Mark Stevens
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
Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~Ben Jonson
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens
Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with
theories, and is killed outright by a sermon. ~Agnes Repplier,
Points of View, 1891
Art disturbs, science reassures. ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit
Art is the struggle to understand. ~Audrey Foris
As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~John Lubbock
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the
great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. ~Loren Eiseley,
The Night Country, 1971
Art is spirituality in drag. ~Jennifer Yane
Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that
initiates art. ~Martin H. Fischer
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
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
~George Santayana
Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.
~Lincoln Steffens
Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~Elbert Hubbard
An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler
Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting
in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~G.K.
Chesterton
Grammar stops at love, and at art. ~Valentine Sterling
The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his
world. ~André Malraux
An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.
~Paul Valéry
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, The Song of the Lark, 1915
A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the
artist. It lacks imperfection. ~Oscar Wilde
If one looks closely enough, one can see angels in every piece of
art. ~Adeline Cullen Ray
An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can
discuss horticulture. ~Jean Cocteau, Newsweek, 16 May 1955
The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is. ~Alfred
Tonnelle
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
An artist's instinct is more refined than the typical mortal's.
~Holden Rinehart
For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the
artist what and how are one. ~William McElcheran
An artist must be careful not to throw his ideas out with the trash.
~Dena Groquet
Art is a kind of illness. ~Giacomo Puccini
A great artist is always before his time or behind it. ~George Moore
A man and his art are like a fool and his king. ~Corri Alius
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does
something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ~Claes Oldenburg
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,
The Critic as Artist, 1891
While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality...
true art lies in a reality that is felt. ~Odilon Redon
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 aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things,
but their inward significance. ~Aristotle
Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer.
~Star Richés
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
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, What
Makes Opera Grand?
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, Inferno
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 Hare and Julius Charles
Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain
to fall mad, if they do not die. ~Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day
Pamphlets, no. 8
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world
unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. ~Michelangelo
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
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
Architecture begins where engineering ends. ~Walter Gropius
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.
~G.K. Chesterton
Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so
much prettier. ~Marie Laurencin
Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art. ~James Bailey
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man
go together. ~John Ruskin
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Quotations about Art