Art Quotes

While drawing I discover what I really want to say.

Dario Fo

If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

Michelangelo

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Picasso

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

Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.

Rembrandt

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 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

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Balthus

How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You're not capturing it, you're interpreting it.

Juliette Aristides

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

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Edgar Degas

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

Passions are not found, they are developed.

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

Drawing is vision on paper.

Andrew Loomis

An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.

Michelangelo

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

Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.

Salvador Dali

Life is too short to paint something you don’t have feeling for.

The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Jerzy Kosinski

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.

Picasso

I just wanted to paint.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence.

Matisse

Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

Claude Monet

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

Neil Gaiman

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

Art is a line around your thoughts.

Gustav Klimt

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

In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.

George Bridgman

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

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Cezanne

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

There is no must in art because art is free.

Wassily Kandinsky

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

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Salvador Dali

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

Albert Camus

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

Picasso

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.

Al Hirschfeld

It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.

J M W Turner

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

Success is a worn down pencil.

Robert Rauschenberg

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

Marc Chagall

The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good.

Kapil Gupta

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Aristotle

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Picasso

Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.

Millard Sheets

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

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Aristotle

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Tolstoy

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

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Pablo Picasso

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

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Leonardo da Vinci

An empty canvas is full.

Robert Rauschenberg

Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see.

Edgar Degas

I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.

Georgia O’Keeffe

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

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

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

Creativity is taking the best skills and techniques from experts around you and improving upon them.

My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.

Peter Falk

For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.

Brian Froud

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

Vincent van Gogh

Painting from nature is not copying the object, it's realising one's sensations.

Paul Cezanne

I paint flowers so they will not die.

Frida Kahlo

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

Wassily Kandinsky

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

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

Eric Gill

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

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.

Leonardo da Vinci

Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.

Rembrandt

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 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

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Balthus

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

Stella Adler

How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You're not capturing it, you're interpreting it.

Juliette Aristides

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

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Edgar Degas

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

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

Drawing is vision on paper.

Andrew Loomis

What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.

Claude Monet

An artist must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye.

Michelangelo

Don't paint the object, paint its effect.

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

Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing.

Salvador Dali

If I knew what the picture was going to be like, I wouldn’t make it.

The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Jerzy Kosinski

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

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.

Picasso

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence.

Henri Matisse

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.

Neil Gaiman

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

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Michelangelo

A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions.

Rembrandt

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

Joan Miro

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

To be an artist is to believe in life.

Henry Moore

Every artist was first an amateur.

Emerson

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

Vincent Van Gogh

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Leonardo da Vinci

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

Picasso

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

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Nietzsche

In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.

Ernest Hemingway

Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.

Albert Einstein

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F Kennedy

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.

Marcel Duchamp

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Leonardo da Vinci

Creativity takes courage.

Henri Matisse

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

Marc Chagall

The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

Robert Henri

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

James Whistler

What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.

Claude Monet

The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.

Leonardo da Vinci

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

Eric Gill

Art is a line around your thoughts.

Gustav Klimt

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

The great artist is the simplifier.

Vincent van Gogh

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

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Emile Zola

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

Anton Chekhov

An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Andy Warhol

A sculpture is just a drawing you fall over in the dark.

Al Hirschfield

In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.

George Bridgman

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

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

Samuel Butler

Art is art, isn’t it? And water is water and east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple-sauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.

Groucho Marx

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

Paul Cezanne

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

There is no must in art because art is free.

Wassily Kandinsky

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

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.

Salvador Dali

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

Albert Camus

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

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

Pablo Picasso

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Thoreau

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

It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.

J M W Turner

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

Marc Chagall

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.

Einstein

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

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

Creativity is taking the best skills and techniques from experts around you and improving upon them.

For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.

Brian Froud

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.

Vincent van Gogh

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Aristotle

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Picasso

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

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Tolstoy

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Leonardo da Vinci

An empty canvas is full.

Robert Rauschenberg

Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see.

Edgar Degas

Nature is the art of God.

Sir T Browne

Art is nature concentrated.

Balzac

Art is pleasure, even in old age.

E Quellin

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

Quintilian

Art is art, even though unsuccessful.

J Harris

Art is a sweet consoler in misfortune.

Amphis

He that sips of many arts drinks of none.

Fuller

The true work of art is but a shadow of the Divine perfection.

Michelangelo

In no circumstance whatever can man be comfortable without art.

Ruskin

The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.

Bulwer

The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then to fix it in form.

F Delsarte

Art needs solitude, or misery, or passion; lukewarm zephyrs wilt it; it is a rock-flower flourishing by stormy blasts and in stony soil.

A Dumas

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight, and converts every object into a little universe in itself.

Hazlitt

The charms of the fine arts are, indeed, literally derived from the Author of all nature, and founded in the original frame and constitution of the human mind.

Sir T Fitzosborne

What has pleased, and continues to please, is likely to please again; hence are derived the rules of art,; and on this immovable foundation they must forever stand.

Sir J Reynolds

Whenever the arts are cultivated with success, they almost imperceptibly educate the general taste, and make politeness of manners keep pace with refinement of mind.

Jeremy Taylor

It is the greatest mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature’s productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces which come from the hand of the master; some of which may be of his drawing, but he is not allowed to touch the principle figure.

Hume

An artist must live by his art.

H Brandi

An artist has more than two eyes.

Haliburton

To encourage art, reward the artist.

Madden

It is the business of an artist to sell pictures, not tell news.

Epimerides

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

The life of an artist is one of thought, rather than action; he has to speak of the struggles of mind, rather than the conflict of circumstances.

W Hone

The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

Francis Schaeffer

A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.

Francis Schaeffer

Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.

Francis Schaeffer

The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

Francis Schaeffer

How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

Francis Schaeffer

In God's world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.

Francis Schaeffer

God is interested in beauty.

Francis Schaeffer

The Christian’s life is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.

Francis Schaeffer

What is Christian in art does not lie in the theme but in the spirit of it, in its wisdom and the understanding of reality it reflects.

Hans Rookmaaker

What makes art Christian art? Is it simply Christian artists painting biblical subjects like Jeremiah? Or, by attaching a halo, does that suddenly make something Christian art? Must the artist’s subject be religious to be Christian? I don’t think so. There is a certain sense in which art is its own justification. If art is good art, if it is true art, if it is beautiful art, then it is bearing witness to the Author of the good, the true, and the beautiful

R C Sproul

Rather than giving in to meaninglessness and despair, Christian artists know that there is a way out. Thus they create images of grace, awakening a desire for the new heavens and the new earth by anticipating the possibilities of redemption in Christ.

Philip Graham Ryken

Why does God call people to be artists? Because he is an Artist, and we are made in his image. When we first meet the God of the Bible, he is busy making things and calling them good. Thus it is only natural for him to take some of the people that he has made, call them to be artists, and hold them to an aesthetic standard.

Philip Graham Ryken

The Christian worldview is liturgical as well as cerebral; it culminates with an everlasting crescendo of praise.

Philip Graham Ryken

When a mind is in love with Jesus, this is what it sees: a world full of the wonders he has made.

Philip Graham Ryken

At its best, art is able to … satisfy our deep longing for beauty and communicate profound spiritual, intellectual, and emotional truth about the world that God has made for his glory.

Philip Graham Ryken

The example of the tabernacle proves that God loves all kinds of art, in all kinds of media and all kinds of styles-provided, that is, that they are in keeping with the perfections of his character.

Philip Graham Ryken

All the arts come from God and are to be respected as divine inventions.

John Calvin

Every time we build a sanctuary, arrange furniture in a room, or produce a brochure, we are making artistic decisions. Even if we are not artists in our primary vocation, there is an inescapably artistic aspect to our daily experience.

Philip Graham Ryken

Artists sometimes talk about art for art's sake. What they mean is that art has intrinsic worth: it has value in and of itself, apart from any utility. This needs to be said because there are always some people who wonder why we need art, on the assumption that in order to be a legitimate calling it must perform some practical function. But since God has made us to enjoy beauty, art itself is able to nourish our souls.

Philip Graham Ryken

I take no pride in my artistic talents; they are God-given and I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something that one has received.

Igor Stravinsky

In the providence of God, some people who hope to become artists never reach their desired goal. This may be for reasons of practical necessity, or because they never reach the level of excellence required to sustain a career in the arts. In such cases it is important not to focus on the frustration of not achieving one's ambitions, but to recognize that there are other meaningful ways to participate in the arts. A full understanding of the arts recognizes both the unique vocation of the professional artist and the value of other forms of artistic expression. Even if our art must become an avocation rather than a vocation, it should still be pursued with deep joy and a strong sense of purpose.

Philip Graham Ryken

In my experience, when we surrender all to the greatest Artist, that Artist fills us with the Spirit and makes us even more creative and aware of the greater reality all about us. By "giving up" our "art," we are, paradoxically, made into true artists of the Kingdom.

Makoto Fujimura

Unless we become makers in the image of the Maker, we labor in vain. Whether we are plumbers, garbage collectors, taxi drivers, or CEOs, we are called by the Great Artist to co-create. The Artist calls us little-'a' artists to co-create, to share in the "heavenly breaking in" to the broken earth.

Makoto Fujimura

Art reveals the power of the intuitive, capturing the reality hiding beneath the culture.

Makoto Fujimura

Our sense of beauty and creativity are central to what it means to be made in the image of a creative God.

Makoto Fujimura