101 Quotes about Art if you need some Inspiration
Every artist, beginner or professional, will need a little pick-me-up once in a while, to get over a bad piece of work they thought would turn out well or to overcome artist’s block. Here are my 101 favourite inspirational art quotes, from painters to philosophers, from scientists to photographers.
While drawing I discover what I really want to say.
― Dario Fo
If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
― Michelangelo
Art is a line around your thoughts.
― Gustav Klimt
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you're not going to make an awful lot of work.
― Chuck Close
In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.
― George Bridgman
As I work at my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I'm learning to observe and measure. I don't stand quite so helpless before nature any longer.
― Vincent van Gogh in ’Lust for Life’
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
― Paul Cezanne
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
― Leonardo da Vinci
There is no must in art because art is free.
― Wassily Kandinsky
To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them.
― Pierre-Auguste Renoir
A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
― Salvador Dali
A true masterpiece does not tell everything.
― Albert Camus
If you as a designer don’t believe in your design and don’t see it beyond the context of the film, instead of as a real creature in a real world then how can you expect the audience to believe it?
― Peter Jackson
Every artist was first an amateur.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
― Pablo Picasso
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
― Henry David Thoreau
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 colours flowers, so does art colour life.
― John Lubbock
Anything I can not transform into something marvellous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
― Anais Nin
Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.
― Al Hirschfeld
It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.
― J. M. W. Turner
Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.
― Gustav Klimt
Success is a worn down pencil.
― Robert Rauschenberg
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
― Marc Chagall
The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.
― Kapil Gupta
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
― Aristotle
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
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
― Pablo Picasso
Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.
― Millard Sheets
When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.
― Edvard Munch
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
― Leo Tolstoy
All these months I've been trying to find find a pattern. Trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people.
― Vincent van Gogh in ‘Lust for Life’
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
― Pablo Picasso
You have a million excuses. Write anyway.
― Carrie Kei Heim
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
― Anselm Kiefer
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
― Leonardo da Vinci
An empty canvas is full.
― Robert Rauschenberg
Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see.
― Edgar Degas
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
― Georgia O’Keeffe
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
― Albert Einstein
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
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
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
Creativity is taking the best skills and techniques from experts around you and improving upon them.
― Unknown
My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.
― Peter Falk
For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.
― Brian Froud
Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
― Vincent van Gogh
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it's realising one's sensations.
― Paul Cezanne
I paint flowers so they will not die.
― Frida Kahlo
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.
― Wassily Kandinsky
He who works with his hands is a labourer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
― Saint Francis of Assisi
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
― Stella Adler
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
― Pablo Picasso
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
― Eric Gill
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
The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.
― Leonardo da Vinci
Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.
― Rembrandt
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see - to see correctly - and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye.
― Kimon Nicolaides
The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was ‘beauty’. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile.
― Roger Scruton
One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.
― Balthus
How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You're not capturing it, you're interpreting it.
― Juliette Aristides
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
Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
― Edgar Degas
Stay firmly in your path and dare. Be wild two hours a day!
― Paul Gauguin
Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory.
― David Gentleman
Passions are not found, they are developed.
― Unknown
Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
― John Berger
Art excludes, like love, any competition and devours the whole person.
― Unknown
Drawing is vision on paper.
― Andrew Loomis
What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.
― Claude Monet
An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.
― Michelangelo
Don't paint the object, paint its effect.
― Unknown
Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.
― Pablo Picasso
Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then colour is just a gift to the drawing.
― Fernando Botero
Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.
― Salvador Dali
Life is too short to paint something you don’t have feeling for.
― Unknown
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.
― Susan Sontag
A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.
― Leonardo da Vinci
If I knew what the picture was going to be like, I wouldn’t make it.
― Unknown
The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
― Jerzy Kosinski
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
― Henry Ward Beecher
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 sun.
― Pablo Picasso
I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.
― Robert Redford
Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
― Keith Haring
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence.
― Henri Matisse
Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.
― Claude Monet
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
― Neil Gaiman
It is not enough to know your craft, you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.
― Edouard Manet
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
― Michelangelo
Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.
― Marc Davis
Creativity is intelligence having fun.
― Albert Einstein
Every child has the spirit of creation. The rubbish of life often exterminates the spirit through plague and a soul’s own wretchedness.
― Peter Paul Rubens
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
― David Hockney
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
― Jackson Pollock
In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.
― Kai Greene
A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.
― Rembrandt
The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.
― Joan Miro
It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.
― Paul Cezanne
When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a ‘get acquainted period’ that I see what I've been about.
― Jackson Pollock
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character.
― Camille Pissarro
The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.
― Leonardo da Vinci
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