51 of some of our favorite curated quotes to help inspire the artist within you. Quotes and words of wisdom curated from famous artists, writers, and others.
“Art is either revolution or plagiarism.” – Paul Gauguin
“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” – Jackson Pollock
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” – Pablo Picasso
“Bring your humanity to your art. Bring your art to humanity” – Maxime Lagacé
“I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.” – Marcel Duchamp
“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
“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” – Oscar Wilde
“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – Rene Magritte
“The work of art is a scream of freedom.” – Christo
“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before” – Neil Gaiman
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” – Henry Ward Beecher
“A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” – Pablo Picasso
“I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece.” – Kai Greene
“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.” – CS Lewis
“I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.” – Yayoi Kusama
“I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.” – John Constable
“The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.” – Robert Rauschenberg
“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
“In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.” – Paul Gauguin
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. 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
“It is easy to have a lot of paintings or projects hanging around that are ‘almost done.” – Thomas Kinkade
“The human body is the best work of art.” – Jess C. Scott
“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
“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
“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
“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” – Pablo Picasso
“A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.” – Hedy Lamarr
“Try to forget what objects you have before you – a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, ‘Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,’ and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.” – Claude Monet
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” – Michelangelo
“Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.” – Laurie Halse Anderson
“Art is the proper task of life.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol
“Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.” – David Hockney
“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” – Frida Kahlo
“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
“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
“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.” – Salvador Dali
“I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.” – Jean- Michel Basquiat
“There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.” – Salvador Dali
“Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven’t time, and to see takes time – like to have a friend takes time.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“The dripping… well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it’s a natural part in the evolution of the work.” – Keith Haring
“Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.” – George Braque
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious” – Oscar Wilde
“An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.” – J.D. Salinger
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