80 Inspirational Art Quotes

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. However, when it comes to artistic expression, truly magnificent masterpieces do not necessarily have to be pretty. Instead, the beauty of an artwork is closely linked to its ability to stimulate emotions within us. It is the artist’s potential to successfully communicate a wide variety of thoughts and feelings that make art beautiful. Art stills our deep longing for rhythm, balance, and harmony. When combined, these three elements form beautiful artworks that please our senses. At the same time, art celebrates the artist’s triumph at manifesting their ideas and giving their creativity a shape. As much as we all appreciate the beauty of art, it is truly difficult to express how artworks make you feel. In fact, words alone are not enough to describe what art communicates to us. As such, putting your deep affection for art to paper can prove to be quite a challenge. To help you with expressing your great love of artistic expression, we’ve created the following collection of inspirational art quotes. Enjoy!

If you are in artist yourself, you know how difficult it is to express your internal landscape. In fact, words alone are not in the least sufficient to express what you feel deep inside. Even more so, language simply cannot describe the colorful and vivid ideas and mental images you have in your mind.

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
Rabindranath Tagore

Luckily, art has become the vehicle that allows us to express that which cannot be put to words. And it is surprisingly effective at doing precisely that. Beautiful art appeals to our emotions and connects with us on a deep level. Creative artists stimulate us, create intense feelings, nurture our curiosity, and boost our creativity with their magnificent artworks. At the best, inspiring pieces of art encourage us to strive for greatness.

Enjoy the following articles that celebrate the beauty of creative expression.

Art is quite intimate. After all, it is an artist’s expression of their innermost landscape, their very intimate perspective of the world, and how they experience reality. As such, artists share with us a part of their personality that would normally be hidden deep inside.

80 Inspirational Art Quotes

No matter if you are a born artist or dream of becoming one, the following quotes about art will help you to unleash your creative potential. Even more so, these eloquent statements about art will encourage you to further develop your artistic abilities and to strive to reach your full artistic potential.

Here are these inspirational Art quotes:

1.

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
Pablo Picasso

2.

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

3.

“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”
Chuck Klosterman

4.

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”
Vincent Van Gogh

5.

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

6.

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

7.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
Albert Einstein

8.

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

9.

“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

10.

“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
Oscar Wilde

11.

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not. „
Pablo Picasso

12.

“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.

13.

“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

14.

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
Vincent Van Gogh

15.

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

16.

“Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art.”
Konstantin Stanislavski

17.

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

18.

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

19.

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
Émile Zola

20.

“There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
Martha Graham

21.

“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”
Miguel Ruiz

22.

“Art is making something out of nothing.”
Frank Zappa

23.

“Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.”
Danny Kaye

24.

“Everything you can imagine is real.”
Pablo Picasso

25.

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
Leonardo da Vinci

26.

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
Edgar Degas

27.

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28.

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
Oscar Wilde

29.

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
Anaïs Nin

30.

“She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
Rainbow Rowell

31.

“Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

32.

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one”
Stella Adler

33.

“If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?”
Alice Walker

34.

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

35.

“The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.”
Woody Allen

36.

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
Roman Payne

37.

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

38.

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”
Jonathan Swift

39.

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
Banksy

40.

“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

41.

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
Sophia Loren

42.

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein

43.

“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not”
John Keats

44.

“A blank canvas… has unlimited possibilities.”
Stephanie Perkins

45.

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
James Baldwin

46.

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
Plato

47.

“What is that you express in your eyesIt seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
Walt Whitman

48.

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”
W. Somerset Maugham

49.

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
Albert Camus

50.

“Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn’t seem fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.”
Ani DiFranco

51.

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
Dylan Thomas

52.

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
Ansel Adams

53.

“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

54.

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
Oscar Wilde

55.

“Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.”
Raymond Chandler

56.

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

57.

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”
Carrie Fisher

58.

“… and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
Vincent Van Gogh

59.

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
Anton Chekhov

60.

“No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”
Ansel Adams

61.

“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart.”
Pablo Casals

62.

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
Flannery O’Connor

63.

“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . „
Ralph Waldo Emerson

64.

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”
Vincent Van Gogh

65.

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

66.

“I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.”
Seth Godin

67.

“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth – at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
Pablo Picasso

68.

“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality.”
Pablo Picasso

69.

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.”
Leonardo da Vinci

70.

“Modern paintings are like women, you’ll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.”
Freddie Mercury

71.

“An idea is salvation by imagination”
Frank Lloyd Wright

72.

“I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.”
Neil Gaiman

73.

“In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.”
Elizabeth Gilbert

74.

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

75.

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
Pablo Picasso

76.

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
Albert Einstein

77.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

78.

“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

79.

“What do you think an artist is…he is a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
Pablo Picasso

80.

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

I hope you enjoyed reading this collection of beautiful and inspiring art quotes.

Stay victorious!