Quotes about art
Welcome to our Art collection, an immersion into the realm of creativity, expression, and the intricate language that transcends words. In this curated compilation of quotes, we venture into the enchanting world of art, celebrating its diversity, the emotions it evokes, and the profound impact it has on our perceptions.
Art is more than mere visuals; it's a portal to emotions, a bridge between cultures, and a canvas for shared human experiences. Our Art quotes honor the vision of artists, the stories that unfold in brushstrokes and melodies, and the way art intertwines with life itself.
Whether you're an admirer of paintings that speak to the soul, captivated by the power of music to move hearts, or simply intrigued by the intersections of creativity and the human spirit, these quotes offer insights into the transformative nature and the myriad forms of art.
Embark on a journey that explores the colors of emotion, the symphony of imagination, and the dialogues that emerge from artistic endeavors. Discover the narratives of artists, the universal language of visual and performing arts, and the boundless interpretations that arise when creativity encounters the canvas of the world.
Joyce Carol Oates
— Authorthe art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
Jim Grimsley
— NovelistThe artist had captured a moment that went on suggesting other moments in the mind of the beholder. This, Timmon told me, was what every painter, every singer, every craftsman sought to create.
Flora Thompson
— NovelistAlas! in nature, as in art, we gain only according to our capacity. You cannot put an ocean in a pint pot.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistI work with whatever mediums seems best suited to evoking the sorts of thoughts and emotions I am interested in playing with.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsOf course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.
Jacques-Louis David
— Neoclassical Master & Political ArtistTo give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.
Diana Krall
— Acclaimed Jazz Vocalist & PianistSo much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.
Russell Hoban
— Versatile Author & Creative StorytellerUsually my starting point is something that I've seen. It might be a painting, it might be an object. But they always start from a definite sensory experience.
D.T. Suzuki
— Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the WestI am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIf you wanna be an artist carry sketch pad with you, and sketch everything you see. Get so you can draw anything and it looks like what it's supposed to be. It's a lot of work, but if you really have it in you, it's not like work. It becomes fun.
Peter Gay
— Noted Cultural HistorianWhat interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.
Timothy Leary
— American psychologist and authorTo describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.
Ed McBain
— American author and screenwriterI wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Will Ferrell
— American actor, comedian, producer, and writerI'm really an artist of feeling. I like creating things when it feels right.
Joseph Kosuth
— American conceptual artistAnything can be art. Art is the relations between relations, not the relations between objects.
Ciara
— American singerReal music to me is real; it's what you feel.
Kafu Nagai
— Japanese writer, essayist, diarist and translatorNature as it is-nature with nothing selected or discarded from it-cannot become a work of art.
Reba McEntire
— American country music singer, actress and businesswomanTo me, there's two types of songs, good and bad. And I just like to stick with the good ones.
Eli Roth
— American film director, producer, and actorI started the film [Hostel Part II]with the girls in an art class and there's a nude male model. People think that women are objectified, well here you go! Here's a man being objectivized but now it's under the guise of art.
David Hume
— Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian and essayistIt is a great 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.
James Fenton
— English poet, journalist and literary criticFor poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.
Beyonce
— American singer, songwriter, and actressMy focus is my art, and that's what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I've turned down many things that I just didn't believe in.
Frantisek Kupka
— Czech painter and graphic artistOnce you realize that it is impossible to capture the character of the various manifestations of nature by pictorial means, and that an interpretation based on imagination is equally erroneous, you will not find yourself facing a gaping void as you might have feared.
Erykah Badu
— American singer-songwriter, record producer and actressArt is the absence of fear.
Alexander Pope
— English poet, translator, and satirist of the Augustan periodLove, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd Make and maintain the balance of the mind.
Napoleon Bonaparte
— French military and political leaderThe art of government is not to let me grow stale.
Oprah Winfrey
— American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropistYour work speaks for you. Your art defines you.
Idris Khan
— British artistA lot of people in the art world hate to use the word "Photoshop", like it's cheating or easy or something. I say bollocks to that - for me, it's my tool, my paintbrush if you like, and lets me create my own visual language.
Measha Brueggergosman
— Canadian sopranoI don't need to live my art and almost die to understand my heroines. I want to love my sons, live quietly, eat good food, have meaningful friendships in and out of work and have a very large wine collection.
Charlotte Ronson
— English fashion designerI love looking at vintage for inspiration; go see movies, art galleries, watch people on the street, you have to really keep your eyes open and see how you can reinterpret the old and make it modern and relevant again.
Frida Kahlo
— Mexican painterIt's not possible to present an accurate picture of our culture without all the voices of the people in the culture. So at the emerging level, you can't have a good survey art show without women and artists of color.
Laurel Nakadate
— American feminist video artist, filmmaker, and photographerSometimes it's good to get mad, sometimes it clarifies where we stand. I think that art has the ability to challenge and push, and that's great. That's better than great... it's necessary.
Julie Andrews
— English actress, singer, and authorSadly I don't sing. I missed it for a long time, but my daughter Emma said something wonderful when I was feeling blue one day: "Mom, you've just found a different way of using your voice, and that's with your books." In a way, she's right. It's just a different way of expressing what I feel about music, individuality, art and all the things I've always loved.
Katharine Hepburn
— American actress of film, stage and televisionI think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.
Max De Pree
— American businessman and writerThere may be no single thing more important in our efforts to achieve meaningful work and fulfilling relationships than to learn to practice the art of communication.
Jay-Z
— American rapper, songwriter, record executive, entrepreneur, and media proprietorI collect art, and I drink wine... things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?
Lilli Palmer
— German actress and writerFacility is an obstacle to any creativeness. In any art form. You get a nice effect without effort, sometimes by accident, and you're satisfied; but there's nothing substantial underneath.
Ludwig von Mises
— Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologistThere can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.
Michael Gungor
— American singer-songwriter, producer, music editor, author, and podcast hostThe whole idea of worship being associated with music, it gives you an impotence to make art that is true, that is honest and that opens the human heart to God and to reality.
Jon Foreman
— American musician, the lead singer, guitarist, main songwriter and co-founderI used to think that great art happened without argument, and maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the things that are most important in this life, you have to fight for.
Herman Melville
— American novelist, short story writerIn this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
Joseph Trapanese
— American composer, arranger, and producerI try not to make any boundaries. I try to let all art influence me.
Jason Reitman
— Canadian-American actor and filmmakerCreating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
— Austrian-American actor, former bodybuilder, film producer, businessman, and former politicianI'd always wanted to tell people that when I work on my body I'm thinking about classical sculpture, so I jumped at the chance to show off body building as an art form.
David Cross
— American stand-up comedian, actor, director and writerI think pornography is the only art form where you can be videotaped on a shaky handy cam sucking off a horse and be considered a star.
John Adams
— American statesman, attorney, diplomat, writer, and Founding FatherShall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either; on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.
Jason Momoa
— American actor and filmmakerYou know what's it's changed is my appreciate for the art form of making cinema. I don't want to act as much as I want to tell stories. I want to be a part of the whole collective and pull all of the pieces together. That's what I love about directing.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
— English novelist and humoristThe art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.
Blake Lively
— American actress, model, director, and advocateI admire people who find that what fulfills them is their art or their work, but what fulfills both me and my husband is our family. Knowing that, everything else comes second. We've each given up stuff we loved in order to not work at the same time.
Benjamin Rush
— Politician, physician, philosopher, educator, one of the founding fathers of the United States in the broadest sense of the termThe art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation.
Felix Dennis
— English publisher, poet, spoken-word performer and philanthropistPoetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
Gil Scott-Heron
— American soul and jazz poetI would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.
Don Roff
— Writer and filmmakerThe recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.
Ann Landers
— ColumnistMaturity is the art of living in peace with that which cannot be changed, the courage to change that which should be changed, no matter what it takes, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Clive Bell
— English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury GroupThe forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.
El Greco
— Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish RenaissanceI suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it.
Allen Ginsberg
— American poet and writerSince art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.
Albert Benjamin Simpson
— Founder of the Christian and Missionary AllianceHave you ever learned the beautiful art of letting God take care of you and giving all your thought and strength to pray for others and for the kingdom of God? It will relieve you of a thousand cares.
A-Trak
— Canadian DJ, turntablist, record producer, and record label executiveI think that's becoming the key to where the whole idea of art and culture are going nowadays anyway, is the idea of curation. Knowing what you like. That's sort of the future right now. Molding something, whether it be a roster on a label, or your blog, or a song, or your DJ set.
Daniel H. Pink
— American authorFor artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation-the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing-is essential for high levels of creativity.
Andre Benjamin
— American rapper, singer, songwriter, actor, and record producerHip-hop don't have no fresh energy, none at all. It's money driven, everybody tryin' to make that cheque, nobody putting art in their albums any more.
Yves Saint Laurent
— French fashion designerI just tried to be an artist in my own metier.
Carmen Dell'Orefice
— American supermodel and actressThe minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorAnd what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterTo arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
Patricia Piccinini
— ArtistI don't want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.
Jacques-Louis David
— Neoclassical Master & Political ArtistIn the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.
D.T. Suzuki
— Pioneer of Zen Buddhism in the WestTechnical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIf Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?
Timothy Leary
— American psychologist and authorGiger’s work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.