Thoughts of Art Quotes In English Images Sayings

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Jerzy Kosinski Download or Share

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

- Edward Hopper Download or Share

Art is a way of recognizing oneself.

Louise Bourgeois Download or Share

We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.

- Leonardo da Vinci Download or Share

Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration.

- Steven Pressfield Download or Share

People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish… but that’s only if it’s done properly.

- Banksy Download or Share

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

- Andre Gide

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

- Art Sayings by Leonardo da Vinci Download or Share

Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Leon Trotsky

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Julia Cameron

Art is my life and my life is art.

- Yoko Ono Download or Share

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

Berthold Brecht

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

Edgar Degas Download or Share

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

- A Quotation From Leonardo da Vinci

Art must destroy violence, only it can do it.

- Leo Tolstoy

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

- Art Quotation by Pablo Picasso

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.

- Georges Braque Quotation

Art is science made clear.

- Jean Cocteau

Art is not a thing, it is a way.

- Elbert Hubbard

Art is either revolution or plagiarism.

- Paul Gauguin

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

- Pablo Picasso

Art is a line around your thoughts.

- Gustav Klimt

Art speaks where words are unable to explain.

- Unknown

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

- Marc Chagall

Art must be life - it must belong to everybody.

- Marina Abramović

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

- Frank Zappa

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

- Leo Tolstoy

Art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

- Rainbow Rowell

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

- Thomas Merton

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

- Banksy

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

- Agnes Martin

Art is a step in the known toward the unknown.

- Kahlil Gibran

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

- Pablo Picasso

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

- Twyla Tharp

Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.

- Georges Braque

There is no must in art because art is free.

- Kandinsky

People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings.

- Salvador Dalí

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

- Rene Magritte

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

- Michelangelo

I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin

I am not strange. I am just not normal.

- Salvador Dalí

Art = a mad search for individualism.

- Paul Gauguin

I shut my eyes in order to see.

- Paul Gauguin

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

- Federico Garcia Lorca

Filling a space in a beautiful way – that is what art means to me.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

- Frida Kahlo

Healing yourself is connected with healing others.

- Yoko Ono

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

- Salvador Dalí

Having no silence in music is like having no black or white in a painting.

-Brian Eno

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.

- Dr. Seuss

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

- Pablo Picasso

I had so much fire in me and so many plans.

- Claude Monet

Nothing can be accomplished without love.

- Henri Matisse

Life is more important than art; that’s what makes art important.

- James Baldwin

Every line is the actual experience with its own unique story.

- Cy Twombly

An artist discovers his genius the day he dares not to please.

- Andre Malraux

If I paint something, I don’t want to have to explain what it is.

- Bob Ross

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

- Oscar Wilde

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

- Salvador Dalí

Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.

- Salvador Dali

Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.

- Salvador Dali

The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.

- Agnes Martin

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.

- Salvador Dalí

Creativity is the residue of time wasted.

- Albert Einstein

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

- Simonides

The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from.

- David Bowie

Creative work is play.  It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

- Stephen Nachmanovitch

Tell your own story, and you will be interesting.

- Louise Bourgeois

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

- Albert Einstein

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

- Jessamyn West

I’m in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.

- Claude Monet

In a sense, as we are creative beings, our lives become our work of art.

- Julia Cameron

One must spoil as many canvases as one succeeds with.

- Vincent van Gogh

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

- Paul Cezanne

Life is too short to remain unnoticed.

- Salvador Dalí

To create one’s own world takes courage.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

Every artist was first an amateur.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

- Pablo Picasso

In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy.

- Albert Einstein

Poets are unacknowledged legislators of society.

- Shelley

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

- Bulwer

Painting must be fertile. It must give birth to a world… it must fertilize the imagination.

- Joan Miro

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

- Madonna

If I close my eyes, I see things better than with my eyes open.

- Henri Matisse

So much time is wasted on trying to be better than others.

- Elijah Wood

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

- George S. Patton

I value those artists who embody the expression of their life.

- Wassily Kandinsky

I am not an inventor. I steal everything.

- Anne Bogart

There is no must in art because art is free.

- Wassily Kandinsky

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

- Erich Fromm

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

- Henri Matisse

Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck.

- Ed Catmull

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

- Vincent Van Gogh

I shall be so brief that I have already finished.

- Salvador Dalí

We have always been shamelss about stealing great ideas.

- Steve Jobs

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

- Salvador Dali

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.

- Henri Matisse

The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.

- Ed Catmull

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

- Oscar Wilde

Art helps us identify with one another and expands our notion of we - from the local to the global.

- Olafur Eliasson

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

- Keith Haring

Art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

- Herbert Read

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting man’s reasonable perception into feeling.

- Leo Tolstoy

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

- John Lubbock

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

- David Cronenberg

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Download or Share

Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person - into something whole.

- Louise Bourgeois

Art Sayings in English

I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.

Jackson Pollock

There are three responses to a piece of design: yes, no and wow.

Milton Glaser

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

- Art Sayings by Alfred North Whitehead

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero Download or Share

Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.

Albert Einstein Download or Share

There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

- Oscar Levant Download or Share

Art is to look at not to criticize.

- Edgar Allen Poe Download or Share

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

- Aristophanes Download or Share

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

- E. M. Forster Download or Share

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete.

- Henri Matisse Download or Share

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

- Herman Melville Download or Share

Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.

- Pablo Picasso

It is not a torment to be an artist. It is a privilege.

- Louise Bourgeois

Painting is silent poetry.

- Plutarch

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

- Duke Ellington

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

- James Whistler

A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.

- Rembrandt

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

- John Ruskin

What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.

- William Ralph Inge

Sometimes with art, it is important just to look.

- Marina Abramović

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

- Albert Camus

Intensity is all that matters in painting.

- John Piper

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

- John Singer Sargent

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

- Steven Pressfield

If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

- Alice Walker

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

- Joseph Chilton Pearce

To be an artist is to believe in life.

- Henry Moore

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

- Rembrandt

I couldn’t give you something mediocre even if that’s all you asked for.

- Michelangelo

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

- Winston Churchill

A woman’s perfume tells more about her than her handwriting.

- Christian Dior

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.

- Steve Jobs

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

- Pablo Picasso

The achilles heel of an artist Lies in the hope that his art is good.

- Kapil Gupta

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

- Paul Cezanne

The purpose of art is mystery.

- Rene Magritte

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.

- William S. Burroughs

Art is coming face to face with yourself.

- Jackson Pollock

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

- Salvador Dalí

What is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.

- Brian Eno

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

- Pablo Picasso

Everything starts from a dot.

- Wassily Kandinsky

Art is an escape from reality.

- Henri Matisse

The great artist is the simplifier.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Every good painter paints what he is.

- Jackson Pollock

Beauty will save the world.

- Dosteovsky

I am still learning.

- Michelangelo

To be great, art has to point somewhere.

- Anne Lamott

All art, like all love, is rooted in heartache.

- Alfred Stieglitz

Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.

- Yoko Ono

To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.

- Louise Bourgeois

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

- Emile Zola

What I dream of is an art of balance.

- Henri Matisse

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

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The painting has a life of its own.  I try to let it come through.

- Jackson Pollock

In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.

- Kai Greene

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

- Frida Kahlo

Everything you can imagine is real.

- Pablo Picasso

Choose only one master – Nature.

- Rembrandt

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

- Frida Kahlo

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

- Salvador Dalí

A picture is a poem without words.

- Horace

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

- Pablo Picasso

All art is an imitation of nature.

- Seneca

Look around. Look at what we have. Beauty is everywhere – you only have to look to see it.

- Bob Ross

I must have flowers, always, and always.

- Claude Monet

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

- W. Somerset Maugham

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

- Frida Kahlo

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

- Vincent van Gogh

Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you’re thinking of something else.

- Bert Dodson

An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success.

- Henri Matisse

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

- Walt Whitman

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.

- Austin Kleon

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

- George Santayana

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

- Ward Jenkins

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

- Pablo Picasso

We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.

- Bob Ross

Bad artists always admire each other’s work.

- Oscar Wilde

It is absurd to look for perfection.

- Camille Pissarro

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

- Wassily Kandinsky

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

- Pablo Picasso

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

- Vincent van Gogh

I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.

- Pablo Picasso

Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there.

- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Each painting has its own way of evolving… When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

- William Baziotes

Art Quotation List

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

- Joan Miro

All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.

- Bob Ross

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

- Albert Einstein

I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

- Henri Matisse

I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.

- Yayoi Kusama

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

- Ambrose Bierce

It’s better to create something that others criticize than to create nothing and criticize others.

- Ricky Gervais

[Abstract art is ] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

- Al Capp

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

- Jackson Pollock

I’d like to pretend that I’ve never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything, and then make something.

- Keith Haring

Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

- Steven Pressfield

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

- Leo Tolstoy

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

- Pablo Picasso

If you hear a voice within you saying, ”You are not a painter,” then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.

- Vincent van Gogh

They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers – just to upset the critics.

- Bob Ross

We tell people sometimes: we’re like drug dealers, come into town and get everybody absolutely addicted to painting. It doesn’t take much to get you addicted.

- Bob Ross

I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don’t like it, you can paint over it!

- Banksy

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

- Edgar Degas

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

- Ben Shahn

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

- Andy Warhol

It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.

- Paul Gauguin

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

- Oscar Wilde

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

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

- Brenda Ueland

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

- Eric Gill

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

- Oscar Wilde

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it.  A work of art (even cartoon art) is never really finished; it is abandoned.

- Brooke McEldowney

As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.

- Calvin

Do not imitate one another’s style. If you do, so far as your art is concerned you will be called a grandson, rather than the son of Nature.

- Leonardo da Vinci

I can't criticize what I don't understand.  if you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

- Charles Rosin

He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.

- Leonardo da Vinci

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

- Henri Matisse

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing–and keeping the unknown always beyond you.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

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.

- Emile Zola

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.

- Salvador Dali

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.

- Charles Mingus

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

- Edgard Varese

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

- Ray Bradbury

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

- Salvador Dalí

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

- David Cronenberg

Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know.

- Rembrandt

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat… you would save the cat, because the cat is alive.  The art is dead.  It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page.  To live for art is to deny life.  It’s just to destroy life.

- Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

You cannot be all things to all people. Be unique. Be different. Give to others what you want yourself. And do what you were made to do.

- Robert Kiyosaki

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

- Steven Pressfield

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

- Charles Bukowski

Don’t be fooled by success and money. Don’t let anything come between you and your work.

- Louise Bourgeois

The modern artist… is working and expressing an inner world – in other words – expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

- Jackson Pollock

If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

- Salvador Dalí

The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.

- Paul Gauguin

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptoms of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

- Edith Wharton

Sometimes people say I should see a therapist, but I don’t want any therapist wrecking my weirdness.

- Peter Wolf

I believe in general death but in the death of Dalí absolutely not.

- Salvador Dalí

My great mistake, the fault for which I can’t forgive myself, is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my own individuality.

- Oscar Wilde

When you do things for their own sake, that’s when you create your best work. That’s when it’s art.

- Naval Ravikant

The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.

- Keith Haring

The one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

- Albert Einstein

Creativity is contagious. Pass it on.

- Albert Einstein

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

- Edmond de Goncourt

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

- Les Paul

Art follows nature as a pupil imitates his master; thus, your art must be, as it were, God's grandchildren.

- Dante Alighieri

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Poetry is something more philosophical and of graver import than history.

- Aristotle

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

- Vincent van Gogh

Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.

- Al Hirschfeld

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

- Elizabeth Bowen

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

- Eugene Delacroix

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

- Claude Monet

I’m not performing miracles, I’m using up and wasting a lot of paint.

- Claude Monet

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

- Sylvia Plath

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you talking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

- Handler and Cristina Cordova

Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn’t build upon hatred, but upon love.

- Henri Matisse

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

- Henry Ward Beecher

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

- Agnes Martin

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

- Oscar Wilde

An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

- J. D. Salinger

You can’t learn techniques and then try to become a painter. Techniques are a result.

- Jackson Pollock

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

- G. K. Chesterton

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

- Claude Monet

Bus stops are far more interesting and useful places to have art than in museums.

- Banksy

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

- Steven Pressfield

Don’t think about making art…

- Andy Warhol

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as they are human beings.

- George Tooker

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

- Joan Miro

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

- Henry Ward Beecher

Remember one rule of thumb: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

- Steven Pressfield

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

- T. S. Eliot

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

- Francis Bacon

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

- Maurice Ravel

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

- Isak Dinesen

All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?

- Banksy

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism.

- Mark Rothko

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

- Chuck Klosterman

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

- Jeff Melvoin

The great moral teachers of humanity were in a way artistic geniuses in the art of living.

- Albert Einstein

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

What we play is life.

- Louis Armstrong

The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.

- David Bayles

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

- Agnes Martin

Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea.

- Edward de Bono

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

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

- John F. Kennedy

Don’t worry about how you ‘should’ draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.

- Tim Burton

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.

- Bob Ross

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

- Jackson Pollock

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

- Susan Sontag

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 done well.

- Vincent Van Gogh

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

- Joan Miro

Everybody draws when they are little.

- Keith Haring

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

- Albert Einstein

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

- Elijah Wood

A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others.

- Salvador Dali

Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.

- Tim Burton

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need.  The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it.  Now we could not live without it.

- Louis I Kahn

Color is a power which directly influences the soul.

- Wassily Kandinsky

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

- Martin Luther King Jr

Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.

- Susan Sontag

It doesn’t matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.

- Jackson Pollock

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

Make art that makes you happy. Make art that makes you better. Make art that makes you money. Make art that makes a difference.

- Sahil Lavingia

Life is creation – self and circumstances, the raw material.

- Dorothy Richardson

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

- Edgar Degas

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

- Jackson Pollock

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

- Leo Tolstoy

Let’s get a little crazy here.

- Bob Ross

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. he big art is our life.

- M. C. Richards

Creativity is… seeing something that doesn't exist already.  You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.

- Michele Shea

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

If I’m going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

- Salvador Dali

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

- Frida Kahlo

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

- Joseph Campbell

An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

- James Baldwin

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

- Miguel de Cervantes

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

- Fernando Botero

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

- Nickolas Muray

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

- Marc Chagall

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

- Vladimir Nabokov

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

- James Baldwin

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

- Henry Ward Beecher

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

- Friedrich Nietzsche

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.

- Salvador Dali

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

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

- Claude Monet

Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.

- Yayoi Kusama

The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense.

- Pablo Picasso

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

- Orson Welles

The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls ‘inspiration’.

- Leon Trotsky

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

- John F. Kennedy

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

- Michelangelo

Man needs music, literature, and painting – all those oases of perfection that make up art – to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

- Fernando Botero

Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.

- Winston Churchill.

Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.

- Albert Einstein

Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations.

- Albert Einstein

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

- Norman Mailer

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses – especially learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.

- Leonardo da Vinci

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

- Auguste Rodin

Our primary function is to create an emotion and our secondary function is to sustain that emotions.

- Alfred Hitchcock

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

- Kurt Vonnegut

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

- Pablo Picasso

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

- Camille Pissarro

The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.

- Marina Abramovic

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

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

- Robert Motherwell

In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.

- Ernest Hemingway

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

- Agnes Martin

The activity of art is… as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

- Leo Tolstoy

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

- Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Photography my passion, the search for truth, my obsession.

- Alfred Stieglitz

There is no abstract art.  You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

- Pablo Picasso

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!

- Albert Einstein

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

- Aristotle

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.

- James Baldwin

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

- John Lennon

Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.

- Madeleine L’Engle

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

- Neil Gaiman

My art is capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the ‘practical, rational world.’

- Salvador Dalí

Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

- August Strindberg

Technology adds nothing to art.  Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

- Penn Jillette

In art, and in the higher ranges of science, there is a feeling of harmony which underlies all endeavor. There is no true greatness in art or science without that sense of harmony.

- Albert Einstein

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

- Francis of Assisi

Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

- Edvard Munch

Perhaps it’s true that I’m very hard on myself, but that’s better than exhibiting mediocre work… too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.

- Claude Monet

Great art is indefinable but that’s all right; it exists anyway.

- Edward Abbey

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires.

- Albert Einstein

The power of nature is such that it’s what all art strives to be. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship.

- Rick Rubin

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

- Andy Warhol

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

- Anais Nin

Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.

- Dale Carnegie

Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity that I cannot derive from other sources.

- Albert Einstein

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

- Albert Einstein

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

- Edvard Munch

Art Thoughts in English

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.

- Leonardo da Vinci

It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.

- Claude Monet

I work like a gardener.

- Joan Miro

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

- Oscar Wilde

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

- Edvard Munch

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.

- Albert Einstein

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

- Robert Hughes

To create, one must first question everything.

- Eileen Gray

It is better to have done something than to have been someone.

- Claude Monet

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

- Piero Milani

It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.

- Claude Monet

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

- Edvard Munch

Whatever you do, the only secret is to believe in it and satisfy yourself. Don’t do it for anyone else.

- Keith Haring

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

- Joan Miro *

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

- Salvador Dalí

Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day.

- Paul Gauguin

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

- Edvard Munch

The true painter must be able, with the most usual things, to have the most unusual ideas.

- Salvador Dali

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

- Stella Adler

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy – the joy of being Salvador Dalí – and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?”

- Salvador Dali

Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Bring your humanity to your art. Bring your art to humanity.

- Maxime Lagace

Someone else’s vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it ’cause in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

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

- Georges Rouault

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

- Keith Haring

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

- Elbert Hubbard

The more I work, the more I want to work.

- Joan Miro

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

- Henry David Thoreau

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

- John Updike

It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all to prudent.

- Vincent van Gogh

I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

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

- Piet Mondrian

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

- W. Edward Brown

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.

- Helen Keller

Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?

- Tim Burton

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

- Ansel Adams

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

- Julia Cameron

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.

- Leonardo da Vinci

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

- Charles Cooley

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

- Vincent Van Gogh

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

- Albert Einstein

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

- Coco Chanel

Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.

- Michelangelo

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

- Claude Monet

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

- Alfred Stieglitz

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

- Steven Pressfield

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

- Pablo Picasso

The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

- Joan Miro

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

- Joan Miro

A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Think eight hours, work two hours.

- Mirko Ilic

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

- Vincent van Gogh

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

- Joan Miro

Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.

- Peter O’Toole

All the sorrow, all the bitterness, all the sadness, I forget them and ignore them in the joy of working.

- Camille Pissarro

One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.

- Tim Burton

Repetition is the death of art.

- Robin Green

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

- Neil Gaiman

I am an artist because the knot is so powerful I just can not, nor want to be, anything else or do anything else.

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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

- Winston Churchill

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

- Leonardo da Vinci

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

- Claude Monet

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

- James Baldwin

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

- Scott Adams

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

- Pablo Picasso

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

- Vincent van Gogh

By working hard, old man, I hope to make something good one day. I haven’t yet, but I am pursuing it and fighting for it.

- Vincent van Gogh

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

- Erich Fromm

You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.

- Louise Bourgeois

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

- Eckhart Tolle

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover all as frantic,
Sees Helan's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name

- Shakespeare

I think it’s so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary – you’re happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

I guess I’m a little weird. I like to talk to trees and animals. That’s okay though; I have more fun than most people.

- Bob Ross

There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

- Vincent van Gogh

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.

- Willem de Kooning

I haven’t many years left ahead of me and I must devote all my time to painting, in the hope of achieving something worthwhile in the end, something if possible that will satisfy me.

- Claude Monet

Every day I discover more and more beautiful things. It’s enough to drive one mad. I have such a desire to do everything, my head is bursting with it.

- Claude Monet

Whatever you do in life, if you want to be creative and intelligent, and develop your brain, you must do everything with the awareness that everything, in some way, connects to everything else.

- Leonardo da Vinci

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

- John Steinbeck

I paint my own reality.  The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

- Frida Kahlo

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to posess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

- E. M. Forster

Art is on the side of the oppressed.  Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

- Edith Wharton

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist.  Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all.  It there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

- Federico Fellini

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we rally can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

- Jeff Melvoin

If people would just look at the paintings, I don’t think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It’s like looking at a bed of flowers, you don’t tear your hair out over what it means.

- Jackson Pollock