Famous Artist’s Quotes

99 Inspiring Quotes about

Art from Famous Artists

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

  2. “Creativity takes courage.” Henri Matisse  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  19. 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  

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

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

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

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

  24. “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  

  25. “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  

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

  27. “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  

  28. “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” Frida Kahlo  

  29. “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  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  64. “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  

  65. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau  

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

  67. “There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their

  68. art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.” Pablo Picasso  

  69. “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  

  70. “If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.”  Albrecht Durer  

  71. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Pablo Picasso  

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

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

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

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

  76. “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  

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

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

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

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

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

  82. “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  

  83. “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” Vincent Van Gogh  

  84. “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau  

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

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

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

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

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

  90. “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  

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

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

  93. “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  

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

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

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

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

  98. “I invent nothing, I rediscover.” Auguste Rodin  

  99. “I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” Vincent van Gogh  

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

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