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

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“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