64 Inspiring Art Quotes

Inspiration is the lifeblood of creativity, often found in the words and wisdom of those who dared to see the world through a different lens. When it comes to art, quotes from artists, thinkers, and visionaries provide unique insights into the creative process, revealing the profound connection between emotion and expression. Whether you’re an artist seeking motivation, a lover of art appreciating its beauty, or someone interested in exploring the depths of human creativity, these quotes serve as a powerful reminder of art’s ability to transform perceptions and inspire action. Dive into this curated collection of 64 inspiring art quotes that celebrate the spirit of creativity and the enduring power of artistic expression.

1. “Everything you can imagine is real.” - Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

5. “Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.” - Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn

6. “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

7. “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” - Mikhail Bakunin

8. “If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.” - Peter Shaffer

9. “He who works with his hands is a laborer.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

10. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” - Thomas Merton

11. “Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.” - Oscar Wilde

12. “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

13. “Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.” - Albert Camus

14. “ Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action.” - Burton Rascoe

15. “Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.” - Marshall McLuhan

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

17. “My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.” - Andy Goldsworthy

18. “Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?"Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.” - Isak Dinesen

19. “Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.” - Louis de Bernières

20. “To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

21. “In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.” - Clarice Lispector

22. “...What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.” - Orson Scott Card

23. “If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.” - Walker Percy

24. “You collect art: you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do.” - Ian McDonald

25. “Sometimes an artist's first invention is herself.” - Stephanie Vaughn

26. “The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies” - Kate Chopin

27. “Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.” - Michael Oakeshott

28. “أعتقد أن الأديب يجب ألا يقيد نفسه في التأليف بمذهب يترسمه فالأدب ميدان فسيح على الأديب أن يمرح فيه طليقا فليرسل روحه على سجيتها فما المذاهب الأدبية الا من صنع النقاد و ضعوها لينظموا بها فنهم و يخضعوه لقوانين منطقية” - محمود تيمور

29. “There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.” - Coco Chanel

30. “I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.” - Frederick Frank

31. “Where utility ends and decoration begins is perfection.” - Jack Gardner

32. “From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ” - Ray Bradbury

33. “Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.” - Oscar Wilde

34. “His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.” - Victor Hugo

35. “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” - Wassilly Kandinsky

36. “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

37. “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

38. “Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.” - W.H. Auden

39. “Art is not in some far-off place.” - Lydia Davis

40. “They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets.” - Philip K. Dick

41. “Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.” - Joris-Karl Huysmans

42. “I will admit that I wanted to shout for standing on the top of a scaffold in front of a good new wall always goes to my head. It is a sensation something between that of an angel let out of his cage into a new sky and a drunkard turned loose in a royal cellar.And after all, what nobler elevation could you find in this world than the scaffold of a wall painter? No admiral on the bridge of a new battleship designed by the old navy, could feel more pleased with himself than Gulley, on two planks, forty feet above dirt level, with his palette table beside him, his brush in his hand, and the draught blowing up his trousers; cleared for action.” - Joyce Cary

43. “Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils” - Francis Bacon

44. “Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.” - Chuck Jones

45. “God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.” - Ralph Ellison

46. “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

47. “Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.” - Anne Frasier

48. “..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.” - Henry James

49. “Journalism is not a precise science, it's a crude art” - Dan Rather

50. “Creation from chaos is natural. We've come to a place where we've realized that we have this actual physical need to create things. We've discovered that we hate people en masse, we're sick of homogenized culture, and these realizations have left holes in our hearts. We create to fill those holes, to be able to sleep at night knowing we've done something, even a small something, to confront the manufactured culture that is currently being churned out.” - Renee Rigdon

51. “Your right. We do spend a lot of time worrying about our looks, instead of focusing on what's inside. - RavenThe artist has the power to capture that. To express what he thinks about the subject. I thought that was much more romantic then seeing myself in a cold, stark glass reflection. - Alexander” - Ellen Schreiber

52. “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” - Bertrand Russell

53. “Every time I create something, whether an idea or a work of art, initially, its supposed completion seems absolutely perfect to me. However the more I think about it, stare it down, the more it marinates in my soul over the hours, days, and weeks, the more flaws I start to find in it; and finally, the more I'm pressed to continue enhancing it. It essentially turns out that whatever thing a flawed and imperfect, human eye once thought was amazing begins to appear quite wretched. This is why, eternally, God cannot be impressed by mere talents or by mortal achievements. To perfect eyes, I imagine that great is not really that great; rather, humility is ultimately a human being's true greatness.” - Criss Jami

54. “Bakat seakan menjadi tumbal, seolah dengan mudahnya menyalahkan Si Bakat terhadap hal-hal yang tidak mereka kuasai” - Wahyu Aditya

55. “Fortunately for me, I know well enough what I want, and am basically utterly indifferent to the criticism that I work to hurriedly. In answer to that, I have done some things even more hurriedly theses last few days.” - Vincent Van Gogh

56. “Arturo Vega: I always thought the ONLY way to really conquer evil is to make love to it. My favourite dream is always the one where I face the devil. I'm in the nude and the devil appears, and he is a beautiful blue. He looks like a mannequin, he looks like a robot. He doesn't have any clothes on, of course, and he's blue and shiny. I keep hearing voices that say, "It's him! It's him!" And I go, "Okay."So he comes and faces me and I look at him and he's a little taller than me, not much taller, but a little taller, and I say, "I like you." And he says, "I like you too." But he starts beating me up, RA RA RA RA, and I'm down on the floor - and then all of the sudden, he turns into a little baby, like a baby, just a few months old, and then I fuck him, ha ha ha ha. And while I'm fucking him, he's moving his hands, he's moving them like a helpless baby.So I always thought that to conquer evil, you have to make love to it. You have to understand it.” - Legs McNeil

57. “Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.” - Diane Wakoski

58. “The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

59. “What pleases is what is terrible, gentle, and poetic.” - Georges Franju

60. “none of my art is based on how others think i should have done it.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

61. “...the mode by which he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself. Perhaps it was in this, I said to Albertine, this unknown quality of a unique world which no other composer had ever yet revealed, that the most authentic proof of genius lies, even more than in the content of the work itself. "Even in literature?” Albertine inquired. “Even in literature.” And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil’s works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world. “If it were not so late, my sweet,” I said to her, “I would show you this quality in all the writers whose works you read while I’m asleep, I would show you the same identity as in Vinteuil. These key-phrases, which you are beginning to recognise as I do, my little Albertine, the same in the sonata, in the septet, in the other works, would be, say for instance in Barbey dAurevilly, a hidden reality revealed by a physical sign, the physiological blush...” - Marcel Proust

62. “Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.” - Steven Pressfield

63. “Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.” - Ralph Ellison

64. “When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I am going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I've learned to channel my experiences into them.The last two -- distractions and fears -- are the dangerous ones. They're the habitual demons that invade the launch of any project. No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you've begun. When I feel that sense of dread, I try to make it as specific as possible. Let me tell you my five big fears:1. People will laugh at me.2. Someone has done it before.3. I have nothing to say. 4. I will upset someone I love. 5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind."There are mighty demons, but they're hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they'll shut down my impulses ('No, you can't do that') and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout.1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven't yet, and they're not going to start now....2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it's all been done before. Nothing's original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say.4. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you're a good person with good intentions. You're trying to create unity, not discord.5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, 'Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.' But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.” - Twyla Tharp