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Art quotes inspire us to do our very best, working with renewed vigor. When you read quotes about art, you may feel uplifted and motivated to do your very best.

Artists have experience in the field and understand what it takes to stimulate creativity.

We’ve put together a collection of inspirational art quotes to uplift, motivate and encourage you.

As an added bonus we’ve also added some funny quotes about art, simply just to make you laugh.

Quotes about the arts:

“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” Jean Dubuffet

“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent van Gogh

“I can’t understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.” Hans Hofmann

“A picture is a poem without words”Horace

“I just decided, when someone says you can’t do something. DO MORE OF IT.” Faith Ringgold

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

“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked… I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute” Helen Frankenthaler

“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke” Jerzy Kosinski

“As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance”Calvin & Hobbes

“If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth story to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.” Eugène Delacroix

“The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.” Rene Magritte

“Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” Anni Albers

“I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.” Frida Kahlo

“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.” Wassily Kandinsky

“I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it.” Henri Matisse

“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.” Paul Cézanne

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it” Ansel Adams

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works: if from the head, almost nothing.” Marc Chagall

“Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.” Diego Rivera

“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.” Piet Mondrian

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Salvador Dali

“ In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” Francis Bacon

“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

“Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.” Marc Chagall

“Don’t be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.” Paul Cezanne

“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.” Rene Magritte

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” – John W. Gardner

“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” – Robert Henri

object-700x467 Inspirational art quotes from artists and famous people

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

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”
Alberto Giacometti

“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” – Andre Gide

“I invent nothing, I rediscover.” Auguste Rodin

“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

“It is important to express oneself…provided the feelings are real and are taken from you own experience.” Berthe Morisot

“A Good artist has less time than ideas.” Martin Kippenberger

“To be an artist is to believe in life.” Henry Moore

“Every good painter paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas

“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

“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

“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.” Vincent van Gogh

“Creativity takes courage.” Henri Matisse

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” Edward Hopper

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” Andy Warhol

“What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.” Amadeo Modigliani

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Pablo Picasso

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” Marc Chagall

“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” Paul Cezanne

“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” Edvard Munch

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” Charles Horton Cooley

“There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.” Henry Moore

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” Leonardo da Vinci

“An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.” Paul Valéry

“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

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” Pablo Picasso

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” Stella Adler

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

“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’” Vincent Van Gogh

“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

“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

“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” Auguste Rodin

“Painting is a means of self-enlightenment.” John Olsen

“The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.” Vincent Van Gogh

“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

“If you always do what you always did – you’ll always get what you always got.”
Unknown

“I don’t say everything, but I paint everything.” Pablo Picasso

“The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.” Vincent Van Gogh

“The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.” Banksy

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” Twyla Tharp

“Art is the stored honey of the human soul.” Theodore Dreiser

“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” James McNeill Whistler

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” Vincent Van Gogh

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams

“Inspiration does exist but it must find you working.” Pablo Picasso

“The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.” Vincent Van Gogh

“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

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” DrSuess

“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 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

“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

“I wish they would only take me as I am.” Vincent Van Gogh

“Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.” Rembrandt

“Art is never finished, only abandoned” Leonardo Da Vinci

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

“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. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.” Mark Rothko

“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.” Salvador Dali

“The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.” Lucian Freud

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” Leonardo da Vinci

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Pablo Picasso

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free” Michelangelo

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

“There is no must in art because art is free.” Wassily Kandinsky

“Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.” Leonardo da Vinci

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

“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” Claude Monet

“Art, Undeniably, is conductive to happiness.” unknown

“Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.” Vincent Van Gogh

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso

“Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.” Andy Warhol

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

“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

“A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.” Paul Gardner

“A great artist is always before his time or behind it.” George Moore

“As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.” Vincent van Gogh

“Do not fear mistakes – there are none.” Miles David

“A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” Michelangelo

“In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.” Henri de Toulouse Lautrec

“You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.” Pierre Auguste Renoir

Did you enjoy these art quotes?

We hope you found inspiration amongst these art quotes. As Joseph Beuys explained, every human being is an artist. We hope the wise words found in these art quotes will inspire your creativity.

Famous art quotes can motivate you to work from the soul, do your best and to keep trying until you reach your creative goals. These quotes about the arts are sure to inspire and motivate you to keep striving to do your best. Remember to share your favorite art quotes on social media.

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