The power of art is undeniable. Many of the world’s greatest artists have created remarkable works that have deeply impacted humanity. Their insights into the creative process and life, even if hundreds of years old, still resonate with so many of us today. Inspirational art quotes will spark your imagination, help you tackle a project with enthusiasm, and make something beautiful. So, take a few minutes to reflect on these timeless words to be moved, enlightened, and motivated by the wisdom of the ages and be ready to unlock your own inner creativity.
Best Art Quotes
While drawing I discover what I really want to say. Dario Fo
Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso
If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. Michelangelo
Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. Rainbow Rowell
Art is a line around your thoughts. Gustav Klimt
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. George Bernard Shaw
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work. Chuck Close
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. Leonardo da Vinci
As I work at my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I’m learning to observe and measure. I don’t stand quite so helpless before nature any longer. Vincent van Gogh
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star. Friedrich Nietzsche
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. Paul Cezanne
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. Pablo Picasso
Art is never finished, only abandoned. Leonardo da Vinci
It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. Vincent Van Gogh
There is no must in art because art is free. Wassily Kandinsky
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Albert Einstein
To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them. Pierre Auguste Renoir
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth. Pablo Picasso
A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others. Salvador Dali
A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Leonardo da Vinci
A true masterpiece does not tell everything. Albert Camus
I dream my painting and I paint my dream. Vincent Willem van Gogh
If you as a designer don’t believe in your design and don’t see it beyond the context of the film, instead of as a real creature in a real world then how can you expect the audience to believe it? Peter Jackson
Every artist was first an amateur. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. Clive Barker
I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do. Bob Ross
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
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. Pablo Picasso
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls. Anais Nin
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. Henry David Thoreau
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you I am here to live out loud. Émile Zola
Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colours flowers, so does art colour life. John Lubbock
Art and love are the same thing It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. Chuck Klosterman
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. Thomas Merton
Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons. Al Hirschfeld
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. Pablo Picasso
It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create. J. M. W. Turner
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? John Keats
Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want. Gustav Klimt
Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television. Woody Allen
Success is a worn down pencil. Robert Rauschenberg
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. Marc Chagall
What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce. Karl Lagerfeld
The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good. Kapil Gupta
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist a master and that is what Auguste Rodin was can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben Growing old doesn’t matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired but it does to them. Robert Heinlein
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth without caring twopence how often it has been told before you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. C.S. Lewis
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. Anais Nin
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Edgar Degas
We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents. Bob Ross
Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands. Millard Sheets
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. Vincent Van Gogh
When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights. Edvard Munch
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
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. Leo Tolstoy
Creativity takes courage. Henri Matisse
All these months I’ve been trying to find find a pattern. Trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people. Vincent van Gogh
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. Oscar Wilde
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso
I don’t mind being burdened with being glamorous and sexual. Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity. Marilyn Monroe
You have a million excuses. Write anyway. Carrie Kei Heim
Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will. Anselm Kiefer
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. Oscar Wilde
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. Leonardo da Vinci
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. Albert Einstein
An empty canvas is full. Robert Rauschenberg
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. Oscar Wilde
Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see. Edgar Degas
We have art in order not to die of the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free. Georgia O’Keeffe
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. Ansel Adams
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. Pablo Picasso
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self conscious, and anything self conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. Ray Bradbury
One eye sees, the other feels. Paul Klee
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. Neil Gaiman
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. Ansel Adams
More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed. Joan Miro
The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious. Lester Bangs
My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing. Peter Falk
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Oscar Wilde
For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in. Brian Froud
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. Ursula K. LeGuin
Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul. Vincent van Gogh
When I was a child my mother said to me, If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope. Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. Pablo Picasso
Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realising one’s sensations. Paul Cezanne
The human body is the best work of art. Jess C. Scott
I paint flowers so they will not die. Frida Kahlo
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun. Pablo Picasso
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. Wassily Kandinsky
It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Sally Rooney
He who works with his hands is a labourer. 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
Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out. Criss Jami
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. Stella Adler
When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time. Lady Gaga
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. Pablo Picasso
A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know. Diane Arbus
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist. Eric Gill
The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands. Leonardo da Vinci
You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life. Joan Miro
If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams. Yann Martel
The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of. Leonardo da Vinci
Nature is a haunted house but Art is a house that tries to be haunted. Emily Dickinson
Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know. Rembrandt
Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh now you tell me what you know. Groucho Marx
Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see to see correctly and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. Kimon Nicolaides
The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was beauty. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile. Roger Scruton
If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that. I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it. John Lennon
One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil. Balthus
Art is to console those who are broken by life. Vincent van Gogh
How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it. Juliette Aristides
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him. Dylan Thomas
If you hear a voice within you saying, You are not a painter, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced. Vincent van Gogh
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. Martha Graham
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. Edgar Degas
Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag. Laurie Halse Anderson
Stay firmly in your path and dare. Be wild two hours a day! Paul Gauguin
Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory. David Gentleman
Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple. J.K. Rowling
Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself. John Berger
An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye. Michelangelo
And now, I’m just trying to change the world, one sequin at a time. Lady Gaga
Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth. Pablo Picasso
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. Leonardo da Vinci
Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter’s identity, his style, his conviction, and then colour is just a gift to the drawing. Fernando Botero
Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art. Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing. Salvador Dali
It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve. Georgia O’Keeffe
Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art. Susan Sontag
Your mind is working at its best when you’re being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity. Banksy
A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not. Leonardo da Vinci
Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous. Toni Morrison
The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. Jerzy Kosinski
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding. Leonardo da Vinci
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. Henry Ward Beecher
The first step especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. Chuck Palahniuk
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun. Pablo Picasso
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. James Baldwin
I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing. Robert Redford
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Banksy
Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. Keith Haring
A writer and, I believe, generally all persons must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. Jorge Luis Borges
Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence. Henri Matisse
All art is quite useless. Oscar Wilde
Colour is my day long obsession, joy and torment. Claude Monet
You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. George Bernard Shaw
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before. Neil Gaiman
I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality. Frida Kahlo
It is not enough to know your craft, you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more. Edouard Manet
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. Ansel Adams
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. Michelangelo
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. Ursula K. Le Guin
Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience. Marc Davis
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. Mikhail Bakunin
Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. G.K. Chesterton
Every child has the spirit of creation. The rubbish of life often exterminates the spirit through plague and a soul’s own wretchedness. Peter Paul Rubens
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for. Alice Walker
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache. David Hockney
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. Flannery O’Connor
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. Jackson Pollock
Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. Confucius
In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece. Kai Greene
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
A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions. Rembrandt
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead his eyes are closed. Albert Einstein
The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness. Joan Miro
Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change it can not only move us, it makes us move. Ossie Davis
It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas. Paul Cezanne
Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can. Danny Kaye
When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. Jackson Pollock
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
It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character. Camille Pissarro