More Famous Quotations on Art

Our second installment of quotes on art. More famous people speaking on art and artists, the processes and the drive. Drawn (unverified) from brainyquote.com.

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“I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.” — Roy Lichtenstein

“I paint with shapes.” — Alexander Calder

“I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.” — Jodie Foster

“I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.” — Barbra Streisand

“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.” — Honore de Balzac

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” — Anais Nin

“If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent Van Gogh

“Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.” — Lionel Trilling

“In art as in love, instinct is enough.” — Anatole France

“In art the best is good enough.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.” — Henry Moore

“It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color – not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.” — Henri Matisse

“It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.” — Oscar Wilde

“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” — Igor Stravinsky

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.” — Oscar Wilde

“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” — John Ciardi

“Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.” — Franz Liszt

“My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.” — Tadao Ando

“My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.” — Clara Schumann

“My love of fine art increased – the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.” — Paul Getty

“My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” — Pablo Picasso

“My painting does not come from the easel.” — Jackson Pollock

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” — Oscar Wilde

“No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.” — Theodore Bikel

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” — Ansel Adams

“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.” — Gustave Flaubert

“Our natures are a lot like oil, mix us with anything else, and we strive to swim on top.” — Joan Rivers

“Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.” — Salvador Dali

“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.” — Edgar Degas

“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” — Pablo Picasso

“Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.” — Ambrose Bierce
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“Personality is everything in art and poetry.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.” — Ambrose Bierce

“Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.” — Edward Steichen

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” — Dorothea Lange

“Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.” — William Wordsworth

“Pictures must not be too picturesque.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.” — Arthur Erickson

“Rules and models destroy genius and art.” — William Hazlitt

“So vast is art, so narrow human wit.” — Alexander Pope

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” — Francis Bacon

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.” — Pablo Picasso

“That’s the motivation of an artist – to seek attention of some kind.” — James Taylor

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

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” — William Faulkner

“The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.” — Walt Whitman

“The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.” — Novalis

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” — Pablo Picasso

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” — Emile Zola

“The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.” — Cyril Connolly

“The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.” — Eugene Delacroix

“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” — Paul Strand

“The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.” — Hendrik Willem Van Loon

“The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.” — Paul Cezanne

Images courtesy gregfolio.com

Famous Quotations on Art

“Art is one of the best created values to ever grace this planet Earth. Thank humans for art! It runs the depth and breadth of all humanity from young to old. It speaks from the dark side of people or from their purely creative joy. However you like it (or not), it’s a purely subjective experience.” — Maxwell Jennings

Enjoy the following compilation of famous artists speaking on art.

Drawn (and unverified) from brainyquote.com

brainyquote.com

“A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.” — Hedy Lamarr

“A great artist is always before his time or behind it.” — George Edward Moore

“A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.” — Michelangelo

“A picture is a poem without words.” — Horace

“A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.” — Henry Moore

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.” — Gertrude Stein

“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.” — Marshall McLuhan

“All art is but imitation of nature.” — Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” — Oscar Wilde

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.” — George Santayana

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.” — Andy Warhol

“Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.” — Andre Gide

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton

“Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.” — Kahlil Gibran

“Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.” — John Ruskin

“Art is not a thing; it is a way.” — Elbert Hubbard

“Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.” — Amy Lowell

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” — Oscar Wilde

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” — Twyla Tharp

“Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.” — Theodore Dreiser

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” — Pablo Picasso

“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.” — Stephen Sondheim

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.” — Gustave Flaubert

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams

“Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.” — Tom Wolfe

“Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.” — Henri Matisse

“Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.” — Salvador Dali

“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.” — Henry Ward Beecher

“Every artist was first an amateur.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” — Pablo Picasso

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.” — Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.” — Edward Steichen

“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.” — Francis Bacon

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.” — John Ruskin

“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.” — Pablo Picasso

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” — Marc Chagall

“I always try to balance the light with the heavy – a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.” — Bette Midler

“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” — Auguste Rodin

“I cry out for order and find it only in art.” — Helen Hayes

“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” — Henri Matisse

“I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.” — Francis Ford Coppola

“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