103 Inspirational Art Quotes to Fuel Your Creative Mind

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Art is subjective. Art is emotional. Art is moving. These good (and short) art quotes show the impact art can have on our lives and our society.

If you love quotes about art and from famous artists, make sure to check out these Andy Warhol quotes and these Bob Ross quotes.

Art Quotes

“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.” – Ossie Davis

“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 colors flowers, so does art color life.” – John Lubbock

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.” – John F. Kennedy

You may also like: These beautiful quotes on nature: https://brightdrops.com/nature-quotes

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

“Art is about changing what we see in our everyday lives and representing it in such a way that it gives us hope.” – Kehinde Wiley

Related: Short Meaningful Quotes

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

“Art is a guarantee of sanity.” – Louise Bourgeois

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” – Jean Cocteau

“You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

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

“I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.” – Elijah Wood

“The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.” – William Morris Hunt

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

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“Art is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it.” – Leon Trotsky

“Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity that I cannot derive from other sources.” – Albert Einstein

“Art is the daughter of freedom.” – Friedrich Schiller

“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.” – Albert Camus

“A picture is a work of art, not because it is ‘modern,’ nor because it is ‘ancient,’ but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling.” – John F. Carlson

“You cannot be all things to all people. Be unique. Be different. Give to others what you want yourself. And do what you were made to do.” – Robert Kiyosaki

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

“Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.” – Dale Carnegie

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

“What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.” – Rabindranath Tagore

“No difficulty can discourage, no obstacle dismay, no trouble disheartens the man who has acquired the art of being alive. Difficulties are but dares of fate, obstacles but hurdles to try his skill, troubles but bitter tonics to give him strength; and he rises higher and looms greater after each encounter with adversity.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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

“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” – Eugene Delacroix

“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.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“Art is like singing. Some do it better than others, but everyone can and should be doing it for their soul.” – Barbara Mason

“All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.” – Iris Murdoch

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” – Alberto Giacometti

“Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.” – Giotto di Bondone

“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.” – Jerzy Kosinski

“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.” – Agnes Martin

“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.” – Marcel Proust

“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.” – Leo Tolstoy

“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

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.” – Pope John Paul II

“Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.” – Khalil Gibran

“Art must take reality by surprise.” – Francoise Sagan

“Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.” – Victor Pinchuk

“Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.” – Leo Tolstoy

“I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.” – Arsene Wenger

“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” – George Bernard Shaw

“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.” – Robert Schumann

“The work of art is a scream of freedom.” – Christo

“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.” – Alfred North Whitehead

“The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.” – Hilton Kramer

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” – Pablo Picasso

“To be an artist is to believe in life.” – Henry Moore

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

“The work of art must seize upon you…carry you away. ― Pierre” – Auguste Renoir

“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.” – Paul Cezanna

“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.” – Eugene Ionesco

“Art speaks where words are unable to explain.” – Unknown

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” – Michelangelo

“Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.” – Elizabeth Bowen

“The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.” – Dale Carnegie

“Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” – Pablo Picasso

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

“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” – James Whistler

“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” – Andre Gide

“In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.” – Paul Getty

“Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.” – Pablo Picasso

“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

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

“Art is the objectification of feeling.” – Herman Melville

“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.” – John Wooden

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” – Charles Bukowski

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” – Neil Gaiman

“Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse

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

“Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art – an individual masterpiece.” – Denis Waitley

“I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.” – Ansel Adams

“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.” – Oscar Wilde

“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” – Henry David Thoreau

“The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself. ― Edward Bulwer” – Lytton

“Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.” – Robert Browning

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

“The big art is our life.” – Mary Caroline Richards

“The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.” – Kehinde Wiley

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” – Julia Cameron

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” – Francis Bacon

“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’” – Vincent Van Gogh

“You have to systematically create confusion; it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.” – Salvador Dalí

“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” – Steven Pressfield

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte

“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” – Osho

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.” – Maria Montessori

“Art is the highest form of hope.” – Gerhard Richter

“I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us” – Mary Oliver

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

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

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.” – William Shakespeare

“Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented – which is what fear and anxiety do to a person – into something whole.” – Louise Bourgeois