126 Inspiring Art Quotes

Art has the remarkable ability to transcend words, capturing the essence of emotions, ideas, and cultural narratives with unparalleled depth. It's a powerful form of expression, connecting people across time and space through its universal language. In the world of creativity, artists often find inspiration in the words of others, seeking wisdom and motivation to fuel their journey. Whether you're an artist looking for a spark of creativity or simply an admirer of the arts seeking insight into the minds of creators, our curated collection of the top 126 inspiring art quotes offers a treasure trove of inspiration. Each quote is a testament to the boundless spirit of creativity, encouraging us to see the world through different lenses and celebrate the transformative power of artistic expression. Join us as we delve into these profound musings that illuminate the enchanting world of art.

1. “I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.” - Georgia O'Keeffe

2. “An idea is salvation by imagination” - Frank Lloyd Wright

3. “What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” - Pablo Picasso

4. “The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…” - Dione Lucas

5. “I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.” - David Lynch

6. “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” - John Keats

7. “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” - Pablo Picasso

8. “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ” - Susan Sontag

9. “A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.” - George MacDonald

10. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

11. “Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..” - Pablo Casals

12. “Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.” - Donald E. Knuth

13. “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

14. “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.” - Henry James

15. “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” - Ansel Adams

16. “Art tends toward balance, order, judgment of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living – very good things for anyone to be interested in.” - Robert Henri

17. “A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods.” - Robert Henri

18. “Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out.” - Robert Henri

19. “Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.” - Kurt Vonnegut

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

21. “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” - Pablo Picasso

22. “Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.” - Elizabeth Catlett

23. “Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.” - Pope John Paul II

24. “The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.” - Jackson Pollock

25. “When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.” - Umberto Eco

26. “Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.” - Joan Erickson

27. “Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.” - Carl Gustav Jung

28. “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.” - Maxim Gorky

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

30. “We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.” - Camille Paglia

31. “People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.” - Haruki Murakami

32. “An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.” - Andy Warhol

33. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” - T.S. Eliot

34. “... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abominations of this earth in the firm belief of another life, in which each will be rewarded according to his deserts. But suppose Paradise exists no more for the artist than it does for the Catholic, suppose that future generations prolong the misunderstanding and prefer amiable little trifles to vigorous works! Ah! What a sell it would be, eh? To have led a convict's life - to have screwed oneself down to one's work - all for a mere delusion!..."Bah! What does it matter? Well, there's nothing hereafter. We are even madder than the fools who kill themselves for a woman. When the earth splits to pieces in space like a dry walnut, our works won't add one atom to its dust.” - Émile Zola

35. “The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.” - G.K. Chesterton

36. “If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing” - Glenn Gould

37. “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.” - Vasily Kandinsky

38. “How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.” - Albert Einstein

39. “But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.” - Dominique De Menil

40. “When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies” - John Fowles

41. “Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.” - Lawren Harris

42. “The mask of art is the means through which corruption is spread. The mask makes vice seem beautiful, turns squalor and nastiness into glamorous thrill, seduces the onlooker into the game – and leaves him or her with the corpse on his hands.” - Jennifer Birkett

43. “It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.” - Robert Hughes

44. “Art is not a thing; it is a way. ” - Elbert Hubbard

45. “...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.” - Dave Hickey

46. “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.(Casablanca, or, The Clichés Are Having a Ball)” - Umberto Eco

47. “Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that "looks like art" and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to "get it right". Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'être to the rest.” - Sarah Thornton

48. “If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.” - Gustave Flaubert

49. “Fair as the moon and joyful as the light;Tot wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dreams.” - Christina Rossetti

50. “Time is, in fact, a cross to bear, it passes on inexorably and remorselessly, destroying everything in its wake, save art and works of the intellect.” - Jack Schmitt

51. “Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?” - J.G. Ballard

52. “Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up, up, to greater things, so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet. Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite, veiled, yet never near, closer than the pulse of jugular, the sunburst that explodes at the center of a carpet signals this boundless radiance. Flowers and trees evoke the pleasures of paradise, and there is always a spot at the center of the carpet that brings calm to the heart. A single white lotus flower floats in a turquoise pool, and in this tiniest of details, there it is: a call to the best within, summoning us to the joy of union. In carpets, I now saw not just intricacies of nature and color, not just mastery of space, but a sign of the infinite design. In each pattern lay the work of a weaver of the world, complete and whole; and in each knot of daily existence lay mine.” - Anita Amirrezvani

53. “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well....” - Rene Magritte

54. “The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.” - Brigid Brophy

55. “Art goes into the world unarmed, vulnerable to every quirk of fate, and it must survive only by its power to move men not to destroy it.” - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

56. “Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a Way of being.” - Frederick Franck

57. “The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us.” - Vilém Flusser

58. “What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.” - Karl Lagerfeld

59. “This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.” - Pope Paul Vi

60. “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.” - Salvador Dali

61. “Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.” - Yann Martel

62. “The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.” - Alfred Jarry

63. “How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'(Amber)'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'(Virgil Daly)” - Christina Westover

64. “Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.” - Joseph Campbell

65. “A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.” - Marcel Proust

66. “Why Dream?Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees.The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams.” - Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy (SARK)

67. “Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.” - China Miéville

68. “كنت كلما رأيتها في لباسها الفلسطيني المليء بالمزركشات والموتيفات الحية والنوار، اعترتني رغبة في أخذ الفرشاة بجنون وتغميسها في لباسها ورسم أشكال مجنونة من ألوان فستانها” - واسيني الأعرج

69. “No one can say if you are that person who, given good paint, good brushes, and a fine canvas, can produce something better than the factory man. That is, and has always been, beyond the realm of science. You do have the attitude of the dreamer about you. For that reason, I haven't the heart to argue anymore about this - it is a hopeless talk. And for a simple factory man like me, an effort must be abandoned once its hopelessness is exposed. Only the artist perseveres in such circumstances.” - David Wroblewski

70. “One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.” - Susan Neiman

71. “I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence.” - Pierre Bourdieu

72. “The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.” - George Bernard Shaw

73. “Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.” - Philip Larkin

74. “In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.” - Philip Larkin

75. “The knack is art.” - Jean Cocteau

76. “The thing is, and here we come to E. Gorey's Great Simple Theory About Art (which he has never tried to communicate to anybody else until now, so prepare for Severe Bafflement), that on the surface they are so obviously those situations that it is very difficult to see that they really are about something else entirely. This is the theory, incidentally, that anything is art, and it's the way I tell, 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 have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.” - Edward Gorey

77. “All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.” - Robert Henri

78. “Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories. It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the upper hand.” - Kurt Vonnegut

79. “Hopefully, you will glimpse something of your own life’s journey and with Elemental’s Power of Illuminated Love, possibly recognize and celebrate something you had not been able to recognize or celebrate before.” - Luther E. Vann

80. “I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.” - Jodi Picoult

81. “It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.” - Aldous Huxley

82. “Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some ..." Jean Anouilh, The Rehearsal” - Kate Taylor

83. “What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---” - Thomas Mann

84. “The art historians are the real wreckers of art, Reger said. The art historians twaddle so long about art until they have killed it with their twaddle. Art is killed by the twaddle of the art historians. My God, I often think, sitting here on the settee while the art historians are driving their helpless flocks past me, what a pity about all these people who have all art driven out of them, driven out of them for good, by these very art historians. The art historians’ trade is the vilest trade there is, and a twaddling art historian, but then there are only twaddling art historians, deserves to be chased out with a whip, chased out of the world of art, Reger said, all art historians deserve to be chased out of the world of art, because art historians are the real wreckers of art and we should not allow art to be wrecked by the art historians who are really art wreckers. Listening to an art historian we feel sick, he said, by listening to an art historian we see the art he is twaddling about being ruined, with the twaddle of the art historian art shrivels and is ruined. Thousands, indeed tens of thousands of art historians wreck art by their twaddle and ruin it, he said. The art historians are the real killers of art, if we listen to an art historian we participate in the wrecking of art, wherever an art historian appears art is wrecked, that is the truth.” - Thomas Bernhard

85. “Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?” - Mark Lawrence

86. “True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.” - Tiffany Madison

87. “In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.” - Brenda Ueland

88. “Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.” - Neil Gaiman

89. “Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

90. “Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.” - Patricia Reilly Giff

91. “On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.” - John Lanchester

92. “...the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.” - Patti Smith

93. “It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.” - Victoria Kahler

94. “Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” - Jean Cocteau

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

96. “Nothing is new anymore. We're living in a post-everything society and "art" itself has become satire.” - Ruadhán J. McElroy

97. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” - Pablo Picasso

98. “Rules kill art.” - H.G. Mewis

99. “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

100. “If somebody's getting depressed in life, I would say, "Look at me'. I've got here believing in me. Sometimes, things do not go as you expected and you could feel as if you were ruining everything. But Everything can be only the path to get to the success of your dream. You can not fail until you give up. As long as you keep going, you are on the path for your success.” - Hiroko Sakai

101. “The privilege of struggling artists is ... the life being buried in what we can't really afford of* what a gorgeous life!!” - Hiroko Sakai

102. “A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.” - Stephen King

103. “Art builds upon art, builds upon art...nothing is purely original. We're all inspired by something...or someone. It's a never-ending chain of ideas...and it's magical.” - Shannon Taylor Hodnett

104. “Approach a great painting as thou wouldst approach a great prince.” - Kakuzo Okakura

105. “Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.” - J.M. Coetzee

106. “Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.” - Tom Hiddleston

107. “There is no Art made without power, and there is no reason for Art to be made except for power.” - Gary D. Schmidt

108. “It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.” - Mark Rothko

109. “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” - T. S. Eliot

110. “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

111. “Art never comes from happiness.” - Chuck Palahniuk

112. “Whether it's trying to convince others that something is more true, more virtuous, or more desirable--all communication is rhetoric in action.” - Leonard Koren

113. “The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.” - Walter Benjamin

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

115. “I am the soul in limbo.” - André Breton

116. “. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices.We can't be anything we want to be.We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” - Steven Pressfield

117. “They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.” - Ray Bradbury

118. “ High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.” - Joseph Epstein

119. “People, there's no such thing as, THE BEST CAMERA BRAND, but yes there will always be THE BEST CAMERA AT ANY GIVEN TIME. Technology will change, but not art.” - Ashraf Saharudin

120. “Mon métier et mon art c’est vivre. [My craft and my skill is living.]” - Michel de Montaigne

121. “Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality.The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.” - Alain De Botton

122. “I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.” - Le Corbusier

123. “The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us” - Gloria Steinem

124. “But aesthetic value does not rise from the work's apparent ability to predict a future: we do not admire Cézanne because of the Cubists drew on him. Value rises from deep in the work itself - from its vitality, its intrinsic qualities, its address to the senses, intellect, and imagination; from the uses it makes of the concrete body of tradition. In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity. Not even the greatest doctor in Bologna in the 17th century knew as much a bout the human body as today's third-year medical student. But nobody alive today can draw as well as Rembrandt or Goya.” - Robert Hughes

125. “The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a 'serious' education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies....Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art -- beautiful or meaningful or emotive art -- is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunningham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting.But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you're not up to the task -- that you can't do it, or can't do it well, or can't do it again; or that you're not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all -- and for those who do, trouble isn't long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms:"I am not an artist -- I am a phony. I have nothing worth saying. I'm not sure what I'm doing. Other people are better than I am. I'm only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]. I've never had a real exhibit. No one understands my work. No one likes my work. I'm no good.Yet viewed objectively, these fears obviously have less to do with art than they do with the artist. And even less to do with the individual artworks. After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about. Art is a high calling -- fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others -- indeed anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.” - David Bayles

126. “The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?” - William Saroyan