114 Inspirational Art Quotes

In a world where art serves as a powerful medium to express emotions, challenge perceptions, and inspire change, words often resonate just as deeply as visuals. Whether you’re an artist seeking motivation, a student of the arts, or simply an admirer of creative expression, inspirational quotes can offer profound insights and spark creativity. We've meticulously gathered a list of the top 114 inspirational art quotes to illuminate your artistic journey. These timeless words of wisdom come from renowned artists, thinkers, and creators, each offering their unique perspective on the transformative power of art. Let these quotes serve as your guide, offering encouragement and inspiration as you explore the boundless world of creativity.

1. “Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.” - Emily Dickinson

2. “What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” - Willa Cather

3. “Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.” - Owen Barfield

4. “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” - Émile Zola

5. “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

6. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” - Oscar Wilde

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

8. “When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration.” - Robert Bresson

9. “Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.” - Tennessee Williams

10. “Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.” - Robert Henri

11. “If a certain activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression, it may follow that taking up the painting materials and beginning work with them will act suggestively and so presently evoke a flight into the higher state.” - Robert Henri

12. “Art is either a complaint or appeasement.” - Jasper Johns

13. “You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” - Ansel Adams

14. “I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” - Mark Rothko

15. “Art is a kind of mining," he said. "The artist a variety of prospector searching for the sparkling silver of meaning in the earth.” - Jane Urquhart

16. “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” - Pablo Picasso

17. “But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]” - T.C. Boyle

18. “Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you” - Ginnetta Correli

19. “The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.” - Thornton Wilder

20. “We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.” - Irving Stone

21. “A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.” - Ernst Jünger

22. “Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other.Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger.” - Ernst Jünger

23. “Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.” - Charles Baxter

24. “Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.” - William Gibson

25. “But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work.” - Gloria Whelan

26. “The French say you get hungry when you’re eating, and I get inspired when I’m working. It’s my engine” - Karl Lagerfeld

27. “Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye....” - Emily Dickinson

28. “When nations grow old the Arts grow coldAnd commerce settles on every tree” - William Blake

29. “Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.” - Charles Baudelaire

30. “I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.” - Marcel Duchamp

31. “Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love.” - Janet Goodfriend

32. “Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically.” - Plato

33. “If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.” - Harmony Korine

34. “The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.” - Murasaki Shikibu

35. “The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.” - Lew Wallace

36. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

37. “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.” - Oscar Wilde

38. “My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.” - Thomas Hardy

39. “You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

40. “I will always know the glory of the beautiful and rare, as they will know security from labour and prayer. As they will hear the laughter of the children they gave life, I will know the torments of the song born under knife.” - Roman Payne

41. “There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.” - Ross Wetzsteon

42. “Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered. ” - Adam Hochschild

43. “No art takes places without inspiration. Every artist also needs effective knowledge of his or her tools (e.g., does a certain brush function well with a particular kind of paint?). What’s more, artists need effective techniques for using those tools. Likewise, to express ourselves skillfully with maximum efficiency and minimum effort, we need to investigate the most effective ways of using the mind and body since, in the end, they are the only “tools” we truly possess in life.” - H. E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

44. “Just as writing can become calligraphy when it’s creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement—the art of living.” - H.E. Davey

45. “Passing from legality to subversion, the need of finding a minimum stimulus with a maximum effect appears—an effect that through its impact justifies the risk taken and pays for it. During certain historical periods, at the level of the object, this meant dealing with and creating mysteries. At the level of situations, and in this case, it means the change of social structure.” - Luis Camnitzer

46. “It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.” - Robert A. Heinlein

47. “You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

48. “Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.” - Somerset Maugham

49. “What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists.What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical.Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.” - Théophile Gautier

50. “This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in himself all humanity, and if he writes what occurs to him he succeeds better than if he copies, with the help of a magnifying glass, objects placed outside of him.” - Théophile Gautier

51. “We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” - Steven Pressfield

52. “The stratagems by which briefly youameliorated, even seeminglyuntwisted what still twists within you —you loved their taste and lay thereon your sidenursing like a puppy.” - Frank Bidart

53. “The loner who looks fabulous is one of the most vulnerable loners of all.” - Anneli Rufus

54. “NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSETo be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wifewho washes the socks and the children,and returns phone calls and library books and types.In other words, the reason there are so many moreMen Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius.It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A.And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween.Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theatermatinees--on Saturdays?Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure,chicken pox or chipped teeth?Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fenderhis teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference.Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training.And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-threefor Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help.I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader,and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricyclerOn becoming a bicycler just before he conducted.Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny,tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary,and I'll tell you no muse is a good museunless she also helps with the laundry.” - Rochelle Distelheim

55. “Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.” - Alexander Pope

56. “Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.” - G.H. Hardy

57. “Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word "art". If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

58. “From recovery to rags and rags to recovery symbolizes art - a perfect compilation of human imperfections.” - Criss Jami

59. “In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.” - Niklas Luhmann

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

61. “I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.” - Bruce Springsteen

62. “For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world – legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier: mountain altars where offerings glow between wintry pillars; centaurs with torches cantering beside a frozen sea – scattered, unco-ordinated shapes from a fabulous past, infinitely removed from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined. These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seeminly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.” - Anthony Powell

63. “Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.” - Aberjhani

64. “It's fun to be on the edge. I think you do your best work when you take chances when you're not safe when you're not in the middle of the road...” - Danny De Vito

65. “The Beautiful is always strange.” - Charles Baudelaire

66. “drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnalround, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,within       I am awakerepairing in dirt the frayed immaculate threadforced by being to watch the birth of suns” - Frank Bidart

67. “This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.” - Terry Pratchett

68. “No one but another painter could know the delicacy required to balance the complexities, to keep reality at bay in order to remain in the innermost center of his work.” - Susan Vreeland

69. “I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.” - Kazimir Severinovich Malevich

70. “I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I’m a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.” - Shawna Lemay

71. “The notes I can handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes-ah, that is where the art resides.” - Artur Schnabel

72. “Whistler,' Manet called. 'How's your mother?” - Christopher Moore

73. “The Painting is not shit,' said Lucien.'I know,' said Henri. 'That was just part of the subterfuge. I am of royal lineage; subterfuge is one of the many talents we carry in our blood, along with guile and hemophilia.” - Christopher Moore

74. “In the medieval tradition, Beksinski seems to believe art to be a forewarning about the fragility of the flesh– whatever pleasures we know are doomed to perish– thus, his paintings manage to evoke at once the process of decay and the ongoing struggle for life. They hold within them a secret poetry, stained with blood and rust.” - Guillermo Del Toro

75. “[Picasso] loved...women for the sexual, carnivorous impulses they aroused in him. Mixing blood and sperm, he exalted women in his paintings, imposed his violence on them, and sentenced them to death once he felt their mystery had been discharged and the sexual power they instilled in him had dulled... Women were his prey. He was the Minotaur. These were bloody, indecent bullfights from which he always emerged the dazzling victor.” - Marina Picasso

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

77. “Because the world has gone nutty and art always paints the spirit of its times” - Robert A. Heinlein

78. “This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it’s irritating.” - Edward Gorey

79. “WE ARE the PULSE of the TIMES!” - Carrie White

80. “Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.” - Naomi Klein

81. “I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.” - Orhan Pamuk

82. “When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.I think the life is the same.” - Hiroko Sakai

83. “In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE"... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?” - Hiroko Sakai

84. “Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.” - Kakuzo Okakura

85. “But the point is this Monsieur...the reason why Madame complains of you is not because of the immorality in itself; but because, so she tells me, you make immorality delicious.” - Daphne du Maurier

86. “Culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.” - Elisabeth Bronfen

87. “The artist works by locating the world in himself” - Gertrude Stein

88. “Nomadom je postao onda kada je o omjeru ljepote počeo razmišljati kao o ljubavnom odnosu između dvaju dijelova u kojem se suprotnosti privlače upravo magičnom snagom, a isti omjer jednako gospodari i arhitekturom i prirodom.” - Jasna Horvat

89. “In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.” - Robert McKee

90. “When Art becomes a Science it is no longer an Art.” - Kevin James Breaux

91. “Art for Art’s Sake is for the well fed. The well fed are all the babies in cradles and my kitty along with them, and I am happy if my writings are for my kitty.” - Lara Biyuts

92. “If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.” - John Green

93. “He was sculpting me. He was trying to make me so he could fall in love with me ..” - Jonathan Safran Foer

94. “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.” - Zdzisław Beksiński

95. “wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it ” - Bob Ross

96. “In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.” - Dejan Stojanovic

97. “We feel lonely now and then and long for friends and think we should be quite different and happier if we found a friend of whom we might say: “He is the one.” But you, too, will begin to learn that there is much self-deception behind this longing; if we yielded too much to it, it would lead us from the road.” - Vincent Van Gogh

98. “Visual journals are created in a secret language of symbols. Intentional or not, they are private maps only their makers can follow.” - Jennifer New

99. “Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there’s nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.” - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

100. “They all want to leave the Gray Space, Liv, she’d tell me. They don’t realise they’re dead until they remember what it sounds like to be alive.” - Kate Ellison

101. “What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.” - Andre Aciman

102. “Modern art = I could do that + Yeah, but you didn't.” - Craig Damrauer

103. “Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.Come let us fart in the home.There is no art in a fart.Still a fart may not be artless.Let us fart and artless fart in the home.” - Ernest Hemingway

104. “...what is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd?...” - John Geddes

105. “Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people, and finally I did on the open road.We had nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore, except to make our lives into a work of art.” - Lana Del Rey

106. “Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.” - Alice Neel

107. “The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

108. “It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.” - Helen Bevington

109. “Smatrao sam da je jedina ispravna pozicija umetnika, pozicija izdajnika. Umetnik je onaj čiji smeh za pretke i tradiciju porugom se ori. Umetnost mora da stremi razlici, Drugom.” - Slobodan Tišma

110. “I came to a sketch where the space between my arm and Greta’s arm, the shape of the place between us, had been darkened in. The negative space. That’s what Finn called it. He was always trying to get me to understand negative space. And I did. I could understand what he was saying, but it didn’t come naturally to me. I had to be reminded to look for it. To see the stuff that’s there but not there. In this sketch, Finn had colored in the negative space, and I saw that it made a shape that looked like a dog’s head. Or, no—of course, it was a wolf’s head, tilted up, mouth open and howling. It wasn’t obvious or anything. Negative space was kind of like constellations. The kind of thing that had to be brought to your attention. But the way Finn did it was so skillful. It was all in the way Greta’s sleeve draped and the way my shoulder angled in. So perfect. It was almost painful to look at that negative space, because it was so smart. So exactly the kind of thing Finn would think of. I touched my finger to the rough pencil lines, and I wished I could let Finn know that I saw what he’d done. That I knew he’d put that secret animal right between Greta and me.” - Carol Rifka Brunt

111. “I will be your poet, I will be more to you than to any of the rest.” - Walt Whitman

112. “It does wonders for my own psyche to turn envy into inspiration. No matter how successful we become, we're never above that.” - Hillman Curtis

113. “If the two meanings of 'heart' are 'center' and 'part,' then the word 'art' also forms a perplexing doubleness: it is something human-made with materials; that is, it is made of us. Art is life. And yet it is distinct from 'life.' Art is life's counterpoint. We make it, and in that making, art is pointedly not life. It is just made of us.” - Brenda Shaughnessy

114. “What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.” - Andy Couturier