Art Quotes

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.” ― Pearl S. Buck

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” ― Walt Whitman

The Secret of Life is in Art — Oscar Wilde

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

All great works of art are trophies of victorious struggle — Julius Meier-Graefe

As an artist, one is always trying to be free, especially from oneself — Andrew Hamilton

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom — Albert Einstein

The freedom is in the paint; one must become the paint, so to speak, feeling it flow through the end of the brush — Philip J. Carroll

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others — Albert Camus

You feel like a prisoner if you don’t create. You’re jailed up inside of yourself — Edie Brickell

Free time is a necessity if you are to exist as an artist — Eleanor Blair

I am at creating my art in the context of a universal idea of freedom. I am unquestionably against all physical and ideological manifestations of tyranny, oppression and imprisonment. I can’t imagine a better time to realign our hearts and spirits around a liberating idea of art as a contextual idea for unequivocal liberty — Philippe Benichou

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it — Berthold Brecht

Art forces us to gaze into the horror of existence, yet without being turned to stone by the vision — Nietzsche

Art tells the truth about society — Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth — Adorno

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

A great artist is always before his time or behind it — George Edward Moore

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

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands — Michelangelo

A picture is a poem without words — Horace

A picture is worth a thousand words — Napoleon Bonaparte

All art is but imitation of nature — Lucius Annaeus Seneca

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one — Charles Horton Cooley

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

An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. Henry Miller

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

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

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

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution — Paul Gauguin

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth — Theodor Adorno

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor — Henry A. Kissinger

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth — John Ruskin

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

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

Art is the proper task of life — Friedrich Nietzsche

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life —Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

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

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye — Honore de Balzac

If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced — Vincent Van Gogh

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal — Lionel Trilling

In art as in love, instinct is enough — Anatole France

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary — Pablo Picasso

This world is but a canvas to our imagination — Henry David Thoreau

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

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art — Paul Cezanne

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable — George Bernard Shaw

Without music, life would be an error — Nietzsche, Friedrich