Death Quotes

Best Art Quotes

1. A Good artist has less time than ideas.

2. A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

3. A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

4. A painting is never finished – it simply stops in interesting places.

5. A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

6. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

7. An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

8. An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it.

9. Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

10. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

11. Art is a wound turned into light.

12. Art is never finished, only abandoned.

13. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

14. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

15. Art is the stored honey of the human soul.

16. Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

17. Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

18. Art, Undeniably, is conductive to happiness.

19. As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.

20. Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

21. Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

22. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

23. Creativity takes courage.

24. Do not fear mistakes – there are none.

25. Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

26. Don’t be an art critic, but paint, there lies salvation.

27. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

28. Every good painter paints what he is.

29. Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

30. Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.

31. For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

32. Great art picks up where nature ends.

33. Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.

34. Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.

35. I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.

36. I don’t say everything, but I paint everything.

37. I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

38. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way–things I had no words for.

39. I invent nothing, I rediscover.

40. I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

41. I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

42. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

43. I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’

44. I wish they would only take me as I am.

45. I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

46. If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.

47. If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

48. If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

49. If I were called upon to define briefly the word Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature, seen through the veil of the soul.

50. If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.

51. If you always do what you always did – you’ll always get what you always got.

52. 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.

53. In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

54. In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.

55. Inspiration does exist but it must find you working.

56. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.

57. It is important to express oneself…provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

58. It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

59. It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

60. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

61. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

62. Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

63. Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.

64. Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

65. Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye.. it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

66. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

67. One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

68. Painting is a means of self-enlightenment.

69. Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.

70. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

71. Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God.

72. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

73. Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.

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

75. 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.

76. 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.

77. The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

78. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

79. The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

80. The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

81. The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

82. The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.

83. The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.

84. The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

85. The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting.

86. The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

87. The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

88. There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

89. There is no must in art because art is free.

90. There’s no retirement for an artist, it’s your way of living so there’s no end to it.

91. They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.

92. Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.

93. To be an artist is to believe in life.

94. To create one’s own world takes courage.

95. To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.

96. To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.

97. 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.

98. Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.

99. You come to nature with all her theories, and she knocks them all flat.