80 Inspirational Art Quotes

Art has long been a profound source of inspiration, transcending the boundaries of language and culture to touch the deepest parts of our humanity. Whether you’re an artist seeking a surge of motivation or an art enthusiast yearning to connect with the creative spirit, art quotes offer a unique lens through which we can view the world. In this collection, we have gathered 80 of the most thought-provoking, uplifting, and motivational art quotes from artists, thinkers, and pioneers who have found their own muses. These quotes encapsulate the essence of creativity, offering insights and encouragement to everyone who dares to dream beyond the canvas. Dive in and let these words of wisdom inspire your artistic journey and illuminate the path to new realms of imagination.

1. “Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.” - Woody Allen

2. “The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.” - Clive Barker

3. “Art is bad when ‘you see the intent and get put off.’ (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself. from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy” - Joel Carmichael

4. “Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.” - Guillaume Apollinaire

5. “It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.” - John Irving

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. “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.” - Confucius

8. “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

9. “I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.” - Jasper Johns

10. “You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.” - Rick Riordan

11. “a spider and a flyi heard a spiderand a fly arguingwait said the flydo not eat mei serve a great purposein the worldyou will have toshow me said the spideri scurry aroundgutters and sewersand garbage canssaid the fly and gatherup the germs oftyphoid influenzaand pneumonia on my feetand wingsthen i carry these germsinto households of menand give them diseasesall the people whohave lived the rightsort of life recoverfrom the diseasesand the old soaks whohave weakened their systemswith liquor and iniquitysuccumb it is my missionto help rid the worldof these wicked personsi am a vessel of righteousnessscattering seeds of justiceand serving the noblest usesit is true said the spiderthat you are moreuseful in a ploddingmaterial sort of waythan i am but i do notserve the utilitarian deitiesi serve the gods of beautylook at the gossamer websi weave they float in the sunlike filaments of songif you get what i meani do not work at anythingi play all the timei am busy with the stuffof enchantment and the materialsof fairyland my workstranscend utilityi am the artista creator and demi godit is ridiculous to supposethat i should be deniedthe food i need in orderto continue to createbeauty i tell youplainly mister fly it is alldamned nonsense for that foodto rear up on its hind legsand say it should not be eatenyou have convinced mesaid the fly say no moreand shutting all his eyeshe prepared himself for dinnerand yet he said i couldhave made out a casefor myself too if i hadhad a better line of talkof course you could said the spiderclutching a sirloin from himbut the end would have beenjust the same if neither ofus had spoken at allboss i am afraid that whatthe spider said is trueand it gives me to thinkfuriously upon the futilityof literaturearchy” - Don Marquis

12. “...the second time you see something is really the first time. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it's put together from the beginning.” - David Gilmour

13. “He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.” - Irving Stone

14. “The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.” - Federico García-Lorca

15. “To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.” - Pierre Auguste Renoir

16. “Art is affirmation.” - N. Scott Momaday

17. “I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?” - Elizabeth Kostova

18. “On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.” - Alex Shakar

19. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” - André Breton

20. “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

21. “To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

22. “To draw something is to try to capture it FOREVER, if you really love something, you never try to keep it the way it is forever. You have to let it be free to change” - Cassandra Clare

23. “Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.” - Vilém Flusser

24. “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

25. “Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.” - Piet Hein

26. “How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.” - Stephen King

27. “Jamie came back to the apartment one night to find her spreading a viscous fluid onto a canvas. It was threaded wtih blood. "Good God," he said. "What the hell is that?" Pia didn't bother to look up but continued to knead the clear slime across the canvas. "It's my new piece." "But what is it?" He kept pointing. He'd never seen something so disgusting in his life. And her hands were completely in it. "It's Jodie's placenta. She gave it to me. I'm going to tack it up and let it dry on this canvas. Then I'm gonna glue-gun pictures of dead fetuses onto Lucite and make them the centerpeice." "Uh huh." She raised her sticky hands to him. "It's about women, you know? The way that the world opresses them, all right? And it's about babies, and . . . I don't know . . . I just got the placenta today." "Wow, that's wow . . . that's . . ." No words for this. He scratched his chin as she spread her hands in a concentric motion across the canvas. "So, do you really think anyone's gonna want to put that up on their wall when it's done?" he asked. She scowled, displeased.” - K. Stephens

28. “From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails” - steve aylett

29. “Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.” - Rollo May

30. “Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.” - Søren Kierkegaard

31. “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

32. “It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.” - Virginia Woolf

33. “When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.” - Anne Lamott

34. “Art is literacy of the heart.” - Elliot Eisner

35. “The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.” - William Blake

36. “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

37. “The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.” - Ernest Becker

38. “Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.” - Stephen Greenblatt

39. “In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.” - Stephen Greenblatt

40. “I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.” - Philip Larkin

41. “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.” - Arnold Schoenberg

42. “As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.” - Christina Westover

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

44. “One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.” - Diane Arbus

45. “There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science and the second is art.” - Raymond Chandler

46. “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” - Kurt Vonnegut

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

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

49. “I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.” - Hollace M. Metzger

50. “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

51. “One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.” - Nick Hornby

52. “Don't be cool. Like everything.” - Shaky Kane

53. “I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.” - Christopher Moore

54. “Have you killed anyone?” she asked quickly.“What? Did you miss what I said, about turning murder intoan art form?”“But you haven’t actually killed anyone yet, have you? I readyour file.”He glowered. “Technically, yeah, all right, maybe I haven’t” - Derek Landy

55. “An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.” - Jean Cocteau

56. “I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.” - Pierre Auguste Renoir

57. “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

58. “Rules kill art.” - H.G. Mewis

59. “my problem is that my body acts before my brain thinks... it sometimes brings me huge trouble, or also huge success. recently, my body and brain got come to an agreement. it may be far better to live this gambling life than living in boring average ...they at least make my art more interesting” - Hiroko Sakai

60. “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” - Cesar A. Cruz

61. “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

62. “je dis civilisé le peuple qui compose ses danses, malgré qu'il ne soit pour les danses ni récolte ni greniers. Alors que je dis brut le peuple qui aligne sur ses étagères des objets, fussent-ils les plus fins, nés du travail d'autrui, même s'il se montre capable de s'enivrer de leur perfection."L'homme, disait mon père, c'est d'abord celui qui crée. Et seuls sont frères les hommes qui collaborent. Et seuls vivent ceux qui n'ont point trouvé leur paix dans les provisions qu'ils avaient faites."(chapitre IX)” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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

64. “They were rebellious through their artistic expression and their uplifting spirits” - Evan Meekins

65. “إن الفن - بمعنى من المعاني - خارج من الزمان وخارج عن التاريخ. قد يكون له صعود وهبوط ، ولكن ليس له تطور ولا تاريخ بالمعنى العادي للمصطلح. ليس في الفن إحتواء للمعرفة أو الخبرة كما في العلم ، فمنذ العصر الحجري حتى اليوم ، لا ترى أي زيادة في القوة التعبيرية للفن تحققت عن طريق التطور.” - علي عزت بيجوفيتش

66. “The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they’re surprised that people are staying away in droves?” - Steven Pinker

67. “Art matters. It is not simply a leisure activity for the privileged or a hobby for the eccentric. It is a practical good for the world. The work of the artist is an expression of hope - it is homage to the value of human life, and it is vital to society. Art is a sacred expression of human creativity that shares the same ontological ground as all human work. Art, along with all work is the ordering of creation toward the intention of the creator.” - Michael Gungor

68. “It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

69. “When I see individuals so passionate for their chosen field, I feel a very strong sense of belonging. Passion unites us – not just every writer and every chef but every musician, every artist, every man, woman and child who throws themselves into an activity not for money or fame or because it makes any sense at all but because they love it and they must.” - Thomas Brown

70. “i want to bleed ink and shit prose.” - Jonathan Culver

71. “I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.” - Michael Haneke

72. “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

73. “Think about it. People in the sixteenth century - not to mention in Jesus's time - didn't look like this: perfect skin, perfect hairdos, spotless clothes. These are people who went to the bathroom in the street, for God's sake. There's no way they looked like this. But that's how we're going to remember them. Our alabaster past. When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened - how we all became so imperfect.” - Julia David Levithan

74. “A young artist's career is a matter of claiming a place for oneself, of saying, "I am here." Having gone through that phase, a more mature artist can concentrate on truly developing talent and vision.” - Wafaa Bilal

75. “Making art in America is about saving one's soul.” - Charles Simic

76. “The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.” - Adam Phillips

77. “Find the beauty in everyone and everything, everyday!Roxanne Catherine Mapp” - Roxanne Catherine Mapp

78. “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.” - YourLeo

79. “My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.” - John Updike

80. “...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.” - Steven Pressfield