Art is all around us and an essential part of our lives, history, and living. We are blessed to have many great artists and others who have given us inspiring quotes to remember about art, life, and living.
Art inspires us, and the artist and their wisdom can help us all in our lives. We have compiled 120 of our favorite quotes about art, life, and living.
Table of Contents
120 Enlightening Quotes on Art, Life, and Existence
Art permeates every aspect of our existence, pivotal in our history and daily experiences. Countless renowned artists and influential figures have given us many inspiring quotes that resonate with themes of art, life, and the essence of being.
These quotes not only celebrate the beauty of art but also offer profound insights into life’s journey. In this collection, we’ve gathered 120 cherished quotes that beautifully intertwine art, life, and the human experience, offering guidance and inspiration for all.
1. “Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.” — Lillian Dickson
2. “Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.” — Marilyn Monroe
3. “The greatest pleasure of life is love.” — Euripides
4. “Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve.” — Mary Kay Ash
5. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” — Abraham Lincoln
6. “As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” —Audrey Hepburn
7. “Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others.” — Ellen DeGeneres
8. “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
9. “Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you, and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.” — Will Smith
10. “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” – Buddha
11. Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.” – Sholom Aleichem
12. “If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.” – Bruce Lee
13. When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us. – Alexander Graham Bell
14. “Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” – Omar Khayyam
15. “Happiness is the feeling that power increases — that resistance is being overcome.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
16. “The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.” — Confucius
17. “The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is a content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”— Seneca
19. “When it is obvious that goals can’t be reached, don’t adjust the goals, but adjust the action steps.” — Confucius
20. “Don’t be afraid to fail. It’s not the end of the world, and in many ways, it’s the first step toward learning something and getting better at it.” — Jon Hamm
21. “Life is very interesting… in the end, some of your greatest pains, become your greatest strengths.” – Drew Barrymore
22. “The minute that you’re not learning I believe you’re dead.” – Jack Nicholson
23. “Once you figure out who you are and what you love about yourself, I think it all kinda falls into place.” — Jennifer Aniston
24. “Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby.” — George Bernard Shaw
25. “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Greene
26. “I enjoy life when things are happening. I don’t care if it’s good things or bad things. That means you’re alive.” – Joan Rivers
27. “Make each day your masterpiece.” – John Wooden
28. “Life imposes things on you that you can’t control, but you still have the choice of how you’re going to live through this.” — Celine Dion
29. “Life is never easy. There is work to be done and obligations to be met – obligations to truth, to justice, and to liberty.” — John F. Kennedy
30. “Live for each second without hesitation.” — Elton John
31. “Life is really simple, but men insist on making it complicated.” — Confucius
32. “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” — Helen Keller
33. “Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”— Lao-Tze
34. “When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life or the life of another.” — Helen Keller
35. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”– Soren Kierkegaard
36. “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein
37. “Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”– Babe Ruth
38. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs
39. “The big lesson in life, baby, is never be scared of anyone or anything.”– Frank Sinatra
40. “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” – Leo Burnett
Art Quotes
41. If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.
― Michelangelo
42. A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others. ― Salvador Dali
43. Every artist was first an amateur. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
44. Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. ― Pablo Picasso
45. Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons. ― Al Hirschfeld
46. Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want. ― Gustav Klimt
47. If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. ― Marc Chagall
48. The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
― Aristotle
49. 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
50. Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. ― Leo Tolstoy
51. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. ― Pablo Picasso
52. Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. ― Leonardo da Vinci
53. Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see. ― Edgar Degas
54. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free. ― Georgia O’Keeffe
55. For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in. ― Brian Froud
56. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul. ― Vincent van Gogh
57. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. ― Wassily Kandinsky
58. 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
59. The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist. ― Eric Gill
60. Art is never finished, only abandoned. – Leonardo da Vinci
61. Art is to console those who are broken by life. – Vincent Van Gogh
62. Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. – Banksy
63. The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before. – Neil Gaiman
64. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams
65. 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
66. The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. – Pablo Picasso
67. Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better. – André Gide
68. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for. – Georgia O’Keeffe
69. The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity. – Alberto Giacometti
70. Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind. – Magdalena Abakanowicz
71. Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way. – Albert Einstein
72. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. – John F. Kennedy
73. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. – John F. Kennedy
74. Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it. – Leon Trotsky
75. Art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. – Rainbow Rowell
76. Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. – Agnes Martin
77. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. – Oscar Wilde
78. Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches. – Andy Warhol
79. Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment. – Claude Monet
80. I don’t paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality. – Frida Kahlo
Quotes About Living
81. “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” ― Mark Twain
82. “Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
83. “Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
84. “Live to the point of tears.” ― Albert Camus
85. “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” ― Anton Chekhov
86. “I’m done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.” ― Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
87. “Live not for Battles Won.
Live not for The-End-of-the-Song.
Live in the along.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One
88. “I think that the best thing we can do for our children is to allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong, allow them to experience life on their own terms, allow them to take the subway… let them be better people, let them believe more in themselves.” ― C. JoyBell C.
89. “Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”― Anne Sexton
91. “How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.” ― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery
92. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” ― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
93. “What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” ― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
94. “If you don’t give up on something you truly believe in, you will find a way.” ― Roy T. Bennett
95. “I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.” ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
96. “You can’t become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times.
There’s life in a nutshell.” ― Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat and Tears
97. “My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.” ― Marcel Proust
98. “What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.” ― John Irving, The Cider House Rules
99. “A good motto to live by: ‘Always try not to get killed.” ― George Carlin
100. “Life is short. Focus on what really matters most. You have to change your priorities over time.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
101. “You’re not living if you’re not regretting.” ― Nicola Yoon, Everything, Everything
102. We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ― E.M. Forster
103. “No matter how we choose to live, we both die at the end.” ― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End
104. “We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
― Thornton Wilder
105. “In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.” ― Lao Tzu
106. “You wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re monster or human. Living hurts.”
― Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song
107. “Find a purpose to serve, not a lifestyle to live.” ― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms
108. “I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes–everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” ― Audre Lorde
109. “You’ve never lived what you are thinking, and that isn’t good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.” ― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
110. “We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
111. “You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.” ― Charlotte Eriksson
112. “Life always begins with one step outside of your comfort zone.” ― Shannon L. Alder
113. “Let your life lightly dance on the edges of
Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.”― Rabindranath Tagore
114. “There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.” ― Shannon L. Alder
115. “Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” ― Jorge Luis Borges
116. “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
117. “I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.” ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
118. “The voice says, maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do. The things you don’t finish.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
119. “There comes a time in your life, when you walk away from all the drama and people who create it. You surround yourself with people who make you laugh. Forget the bad and focus on the good. Love the people who treat you right, pray for the ones who do not. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living.” ― José N. Harris
120. “I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
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