Art Quotes

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

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift

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

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

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

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

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.
Alfred Stieglitz

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard

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

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

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Thomas Wolfe

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

Even a true artist does not always produce art.
Carroll O’Connor

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

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

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

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

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

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.
Henry Ossawa Tanner

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

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
Georges Braque

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.
Mary Schmich

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.
Khalil Gibran

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

All art is but imitation of nature.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

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

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.
Don Miguel Ruiz

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

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

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor W. Adorno

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham

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

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?
Paul Gauguin

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.
Claude Debussy

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.
Robert Delaunay

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

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

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa

Art depends on luck and talent.
Francis Ford Coppola

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

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.
Paul Valery

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.
Franz Liszt

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

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

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

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
Federico Fellini

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

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
Eugene Ionesco

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
Dale Carnegie

Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.
Anish Kapoor

It’s clever, but is it Art?
Rudyard Kipling

I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.
Walt Disney

To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts – absolute gifts – which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul.
Kate Chopin

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
William Butler Yeats

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

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

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.
Egon Schiele

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.
Constantin Stanislavski

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

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
Alexander Calder

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Marshall McLuhan

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

Layer by layer art strips life bare.
Robert Musil

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

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
Ad Reinhardt

Art is the daughter of freedom.
Friedrich Schiller

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Emile Zola

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.
Lincoln Steffens

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Eugene Delacroix

A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
Charles Dudley Warner

The perfection of art is to conceal art.
Quintilian

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

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.
Harry S Truman

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.
Paul Cezanne

Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
Arthur Erickson

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.
Andrew Wyeth

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.
Jean Rostand

What is art but a way of seeing?
Saul Bellow

There is nothing new in art except talent.
Anton Chekhov

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.
J. Paul Getty

Great artists suffer for the people.
Marvin Gaye

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

There hasn’t been any art yet. Art is just beginning.
Constantin Brancusi

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.
Salvador Dali

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
Andre Malraux

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.
Clara Schumann

Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.
Gian Carlo Menotti

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

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.
Leonardo da Vinci

I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.
Marcel Duchamp

All good art is an indiscretion.
Tennessee Williams

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

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Iris Murdoch

All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.
David Hockney

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus

I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.
Barbra Streisand

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.
Octavio Paz

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

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Oscar Wilde

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

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.
Edward Steichen

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.
Wilson Mizner

In art, the obvious is a sin.
Edward Dmytryk

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.
Robert Smithson

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.
Arne Jacobsen

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
Novalis

I’m not gonna give the British Government the joy of keeping taxing me. They don’t tax art. And all my cars are just a collection of art.
Jay Kay

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.
William Morris Hunt

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don’t dare reveal.
Elia Kazan

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.
Kiki Smith

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

Life is short, the art long.
Hippocrates

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.
Herbert Read

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.
Beck

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

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.
Agnes Martin

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
Max Eastman

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
Igor Stravinsky

Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.
Charles Eames

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

The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.
Robert Rauschenberg

Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.
Andy Warhol

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
Pablo Picasso

Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
Henry Miller

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.
David Hockney

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

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau

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

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

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