67 Inspiring Quotes By Artists

Art has always been a timeless medium for expressing creativity, emotion, and perspective. Whether through painting, sculpture, or other forms, artists possess a unique ability to distill complex ideas into captivating visuals and thought-provoking quotes. In this post, we've curated a collection of 67 inspiring quotes from some of the most renowned artists across the globe. These quotes not only reflect the essence of their creators but also offer insights into the artistic journey and the boundless potential of human imagination. Join us as we explore these remarkable words that continue to inspire and ignite creativity in artists and art lovers alike.

1. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.” - Marcel Duchamp

3. “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.” - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

4. “What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.” - John Lubbock

5. “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.” - Eckhart Tolle

6. “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. ” - William S. Burroughs

7. “When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.” - Oscar Wilde

8. “It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?""Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.” - Irving Stone

9. “Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised” - James Thurber

10. “Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.” - Tom Robbins

11. “The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds” - Alfred de Vigny

12. “At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.” - Seth Godin

13. “Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artists who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.An artists is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artists takes it personally.That's why Bob Dylan is an artist, but an anonymous corporate hack who dreams up Pop 40 hits on the other side of the glass is merely a marketer. That's why Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, is an artists, while a boiler room of telemarketers is simply a scam.Tom Peters, corporate gadfly and writer, is an artists, even though his readers are businesspeople. He's an artists because he takes a stand, he takes the work personally, and he doesn't care if someone disagrees. His art is part of him, and he feels compelled to share it with you because it's important, not because he expects you to pay him for it.Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.” - Seth Godin

14. “Art isn't only a painting; it's anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.” - Seth Godin

15. “But why? Why do you care about our class’s history?" "I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides ’Locks self in room and draws all day.’ Even art schools won’t take a psychopath.” - Natalie Standiford

16. “More of me comes out when I improvise.” - Edward Hopper

17. “In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust.” - Jennifer Birkett

18. “What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?” - Robert Hughes

19. “It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power.” - Robert Hughes

20. “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” - James Joyce

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The public wants work which flatters its illusions.” - Gustave Flaubert

24. “Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.” - Marcel Duchamp

25. “I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.” - Arthur Holitscher

26. “It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of moral human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another's lives, of things we need and use...If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the midst of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer...Work connects us both to Creation and to eternity. (pg. 316, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)” - Wendell Berry

27. “Guys don't understand great art. They don't care that sometimes the camera has power beyond the photographer to record emotion that only the heart can see. They're threatened when the camera jumps ahead of me. Todd Kovich was pissed when I brought my Nikon to the prom, but I'd missed too many transcendent shots over the years to ever take a chance of missing one again. A prom, I told him, had a boundless supply of photogenic bozos who could be counted on to do something base.” - Joan Bauer

28. “My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.” - G.K. Chesterton

29. “Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.” - Don DeLillo

30. “Unbelievable,” I said when it was done. And Brilliant and Audio crack and That one will be everyone’s breakup song, and so on, because great is never good enough for the artists; they always want to know exactly what you mean and which nanosecond of the song you mean it about.” - Kelley Eskridge

31. “Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor's heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.” - C. JoyBell C.

32. “I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

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

34. “I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.” - Criss Jami

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

36. “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

37. “I feel as though whenever I create something, my Mr. Hyde wakes up in the middle of the night and starts thrashing it. I sometimes love it the next morning, but other times it is an abomination.” - Criss Jami

38. “To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow.” - M. Thomas Gammarino

39. “Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” - Walter Isaacson

40. “But sometimes, talent isn't worth shit. There are tons of talentless people out there making zillions of dollars. And unfortunately, an equal number of brilliant artists whose name and voices you'll never hear. - Paul Hudson” - Tiffanie DeBartolo, How To Kill A Rock Star

41. “Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.” - Francisco de Goya

42. “That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

43. “The most visible creators are those artists whose medium is life itself. The ones who express the inexpressible ~ without brush, hammer, clay, or guitar. They neither paint nor sculpt. Their medium is simply being. Whatever their presence touches has increased life. They see, but don't have to draw...Because they are the artists of being alive... :) ~ ☆ ~ Donna J. Stone” - Donna J. Stone

44. “Look, I don't see why bad artists - I mean artists who are obviously incompetent... - why they should be presented hypocritically as good artists just because they're supposed to be advancing the frontiers of freedom of expression or... ...demonstrating that there should be no limit on subject matter.” - Anthony Burgess

45. “While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

46. “...As an artist, you need the naysayers and the nonbelievers to add fuel to your creative fire.” - Ice-T

47. “I love you, Lucien, but I am a muse, you are an artist, I am not here to make you comfortable.” - Christopher Moore

48. “...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.” - David Rakoff

49. “Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You’re not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest.” - Shannon Alder

50. “as an artist, one of the toughest things to do is getting someone to understand why you think the way you think. And as much as i don't wanna care what they think about my thinking, it comes down to making them understand or watching them leave.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

51. “That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.” - Amy Reed

52. “You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

53. “Artists are dishonest creatures really. They foist their version of reality upon us while making it all up. Writers, painters, musicians, auteurs—they’re all the same.” - Tom Gething from "Sabotage"

54. “I appreciated art, long before I could produce it.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

55. “The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.” - Michael Gungor

56. “Lucien, women are wondrous, mysterious, and magical creatures, who should be treated not only with respect but with reverence, perhaps even awe. Now go sweep the steps.” - Christopher Moore

57. “I do believe most curators - maybe I'm only speaking for myself here - want to be artists on some level. Curators must have an innate interest in what an artist makes. And they certainly have their opinions and criticisms, and the always ask, "How would I have made this, or how would another artist make this?” - Marion Boulton Stroud

58. “Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.” - Arthur C. Clarke

59. “Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

60. “I think we should throw money at artists, not at girls who take their clothes off because they made a bad choice in life.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

61. “The first thousand are the hardest.” - Herbert Gute

62. “We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just...carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.” - Sam Starbuck

63. “I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.” - Mangum Lisa

64. “Don't separate 'real' life from 'creative' life.” - Patti Digh

65. “... I find myself most drawn to: art that has arisen from a deeply personal conversation between the artist and the work at hand. It is art that walks perilously close to the Edge, that crosses the river of blood into Faerie, that flies so high it is scorched by the sun, and then returns to tell the tale to us. It is art that needed to be written, or painted, or sung, or woven, or otherwise shaped. It is art gifted by the Mystery to the maker...and then, in turn, gifted to us.” - Terri Windling

66. “I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wishing them to come. They might have wished and wished for an unnatural evil to fall upon them but, for a while at least, nothing happened. Then the wishing stopped, the old wishes were forgotten yet at the same time gathered in strength, distilling themselves into a potent formula (who can say!), until one day the terrible season began. Because had they really told the truth, this artistic crowd might also have expressed what a sense of meaning (although of a negative sort), not to mention the vigorous thrill (although of an excruciating type), this season of unnatural evil had brought to their lives.("Gas Station Carnivals")” - Thomas Ligotti

67. “I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.” - Charlotte Eriksson