100+ Inspiring Art Quotes to Inspire Creativity to Inspire You

Every artist needs a dash of inspiration every now and then. Here are 100 best quotes on art and creativity to keep you going! Read now! Do you have an aspiring artist who needs a bit of inspiration now and then in his or her creating? Why not let them hear from the great masters (as well as the lesser-known creatives)? I’ve compiled a list of 100 quotes on art and creativity to encourage or motivate them.

Inspiring Art Quotes: Art is a strong tool for evoking thoughts and emotions in people. Our sentiments and experiences in life are typically the subject matter of art, although it may be about anything. Art reveals our innermost thoughts and feelings, as well as what we know and don’t know about the world. It allows us to show the world who we are and exhibit our individuality.

What follows is a compilation of the most amazing art quotes that might inspire you to be more creative every day. The greatest painters in history understood that all excellent work has a message to convey. Even if it doesn’t last a lifetime, it must be true. Art has the ability to profoundly influence our perceptions of the world. Irritation, and even complete shifts in perspective, are all possible outcomes when confronted with provocative or infuriating material.

#1. Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. – Jonathan Swift

#2. I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money. – Pablo Picasso

#3. The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you. – Oscar Wilde

#4. My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind. – Agnes Martin

#5. A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life. – Christopher Morley

#6. A picture is a poem without words. – Horace

#7. Art is a line around your thoughts. ― Gustav Klimt

Inspiring Art Quotes

#8. Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons. ― Al Hirschfeld

#9. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. – Edgar Degas

#10. If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. ― Michelangelo

#11. There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. – Salvador Dali

#12. Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Pablo Picasso

#13. As I work on my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I’m learning to observe and measure. I don’t stand quite so helpless before nature any longer. ― Vincent van Gogh in ’Lust for Life’

#14. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ― Henry David Thoreau

#15. While drawing I discover what I really want to say. ― Dario Fo

#16. 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. ― Anais Nin

#17. Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work. ― Chuck Close

#18. It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create. ― J. M. W. Turner

#19. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. – William Blake

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

#21. Art is anything you can get away with. – Andy Warhol

#22. 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

#23. I’m such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own. – Priyanshu Singh

#24. Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. ― Pablo Picasso

#25. Good taste is the enemy of creativity. – Pablo Picasso

#26. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. – Maya Angelou

#27. In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen. ― George Bridgman

Famous Quotes On Art from Famous Artists – Inspirational Status

#29. Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. – Thomas Wolfe

#30. Art is the tree of life. – Ali Smith

#31. A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others. ― Salvador Dali

#32. Art is never finished, only abandoned. ― Leonardo da Vinci

#33. I had so much fire in me and so many plans. – Claude Monet

#34. An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. – James Whistler

#35. Art is just a way of survival. – David Bowie

#36. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to. – Frida Kahlo

#37. 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

#38. Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. – Robert Motherwell

#39. There is no must in art because art is free. ― Wassily Kandinsky

#40. To my mind a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful and pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is, without creating still more of them. ― Pierre-Auguste Renoir

#41. Art is a human activity consisting of this, that one person, with a bit of color or a few strokes of a brush, makes something appear which wasn’t there before. – Paul Klee

#42. A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art. ― Paul Cezanne

#43. Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake? – Leonardo da Vinci

#44. You don’t take a photograph, you make it. – Ansel Adams

#45. To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature. – Auguste Rodin

Short Quotes About Art By Famous Artists

#47. Art is the only way of expressing thought without words. -Amanda Lovell

#48. Success is a worn down pencil. ― Robert Rauschenberg

#49. Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. -Viktor P. Chekhov

#50. The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ― Aristotle

#51. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. – Stella Adler

#52. I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do. ― Bob Ross

#53. Art is the only way to fly. – Lady Gaga

#54. Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. – Dorothea Lange

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

#56. The Achilles heel of an artist lies in the hope that his art is good. ― Kapil Gupta

#57. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes important. – John Ruskin

#58. If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. – Arne Jacobsen

#59. Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. – Edgar Degas

#60. This world is but a canvas to our imagination. – Henry David Thoreau

#61. I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like. -Bob Ross

#62. The great artist is the simplifier. – Vincent Van Gogh

#63. A true masterpiece does not tell everything. ― Albert Camus

#64. Every artist was first an amateur. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

#65. What is art other than the expression of our joy in living? – Ezra Pound

#66. Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and they seek to recognise what I am and what I want. ― Gustav Klimt

#67. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. – Jackson Pollock

#68. Art is the human activity that detaches us from reality. – John W. Tukey

#69. If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing. ― Marc Chagall

#70. The creative mind is constantly seeking, never satisfied. – M. C. Richards

#71. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. -Pablo Picasso

#72. If you as a designer don’t believe in your design and don’t see it beyond the context of the film, instead of as a real creature in a real world then how can you expect the audience to believe it? ― Peter Jackson

#73. Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travel. – Theodore Dreiser

Inspirational Art Quotes If You Need Some Inspiration

#75. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. – Charles Cooley

#76. When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights. ― Edvard Munch

#77. Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feelings the artist has experienced. ― Leo Tolstoy

#78. Creativity is the birthplace of human accomplishment. – Joseph Campbell

#79. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. ― Anais Nin

#80. Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. – Pablo Picasso

#81. There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. – Ansel Adams

#82. When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear. – Alfred Eisenstaedt

#83. Art deteriorates when it is done for the audience. – James Pierce

#84. High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead. – Christopher Morley

#85. Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands. ― Millard Sheets

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

#87. The painter’s ideas must be followed by his hand, and his hand must be guided by his eye. – Leonardo Da Vinci

#88. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house. – Edward Hopper

#89. In the mind of every artist there is a masterpiece. – Kai Greene

#90. You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life. – Joan Miro

#91. Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ― Pablo Picasso

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

#93. I don’t want to be the voice of my generation. I’m too insecure, too worried about what people will think. I’m too self-conscious. – Taylor Swift

#94. 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

#95. 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

Best Art Quotes on Famous Paintings

#97. The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. – Robert Hughes

#98. It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be meaningless, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. ― Albert Einstein

#99. Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will. ― Anselm Kiefer

#100. To draw you must close your eyes and sing. – Pablo Picasso

#101. All these months I’ve been trying to find a pattern. Trying not so much to draw hands as gestures. Not so much faces as the expressions of people. ― Vincent van Gogh in ‘Lust for Life’

#102. An empty canvas is full. ― Robert Rauschenberg

#103. What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. – John Berger

#104. Drawing is not what one sees, but what one can make others see. ― Edgar Degas

#105. The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. – Emile Zola

#106. Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things. ― Ray Bradbury

#107. Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. – Henry Ward Beecher

#108. The chief enemy of creativity is ‘good’ sense. – Pablo Picasso

#109. In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different. – Coco Chanel

#110. Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. ― Leonardo da Vinci

#111. I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists. – Marcel Duchamp

#112. An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success. – Henri Matisse

#113. Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. Thomas Merton

#114. You have a million excuses. Write anyway. ― Carrie Kei Heim

#115. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. ― Pablo Picasso

#116. I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free. ― Georgia O’Keeffe

#117. Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. – Claude Monet

#118. Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. – Agnes Martin

#119. The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness. – Joan Miro

#120. In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better. – Ernest Hemingway

#121. The perfection of art is to conceal art. – Quintilian

Fine Art Quotes from Famous Artists to Inspire You

#123. For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in. ― Brian Froud

#124. 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

#125. Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding. – Gian Carlo Menotti

#126. I paint flowers so they will not die. ― Frida Kahlo

#127. My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing. ― Peter Falk

#128. Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. ― Neil Gaiman

#129. Art consists of limitations. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

#130. Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul. ― Vincent van Gogh

#131. The power of nature is such that it’s what all art strives to be. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship. – Rick Rubin

#132. My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process. – Tadao Ando

#133. Creativity is taking the best skills and techniques from experts around you and improving upon them. ― Unknown

#134. Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. – Oscar Wilde

#135. Art must take reality by surprise. – Francoise Sagan

#136. The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. ― Wassily Kandinsky

#137. Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realizing one’s sensations. ― Paul Cezanne

#138. More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed. ― Joan Miro

#139. I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me. – Roy Lichtenstein

#140. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. – Jackson Pollock

#141. He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist. ― Saint Francis of Assisi

#142. Our primary function is to create an emotion and our secondary function is to sustain that emotion. – Alfred Hitchcock

#143. It is better to be high-spirited even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. – Vincent van Gogh

#144. My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It’s about making the best kind of image I can make, it’s about talking as clearly as I can. – Jim Dine

Power of Art Quotes on Art And Creativity

#146. I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. – Frida Kahlo

#147. If I’m going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything! – Salvador Dalí

#148. Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea. – Edward de Bono

#149. The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. – Steven Pressfield

#150. The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. – William Faulkner

#151. I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing. – Francis Ford Coppola

#152. I guess I’m a little weird. I like to talk to trees and animals. That’s okay though; I have more fun than most people. – Bob Ross

#153. Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art. – Don Miguel Ruiz

#154. When you do things for their own sake, that’s when you create your best work. That’s when it’s art. – Naval Ravikant

#155. An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. – Charles Bukowski

#156. A true artist is not one who is inspired but one who inspires others. – Salvador Dalí

#157. Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy. – Albert Einstein

#158. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. – Edgar Degas

#159. The true work of art is but a shadow of divine perfection. – Michelangelo

#160. The principle of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. – Jerzy Kosinski

#161. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation. Auguste Rodin

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

#163. To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect. – Alexander Calder

#164. I dream of painting and then I paint my dream. – Vincent Van Gogh

#165. Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus. – David Hockney

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

#167. Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible. – Balthus

True Art Quotes That Will Actually Inspire You!

#169.

#170. Creativity takes courage. – Henri Matisse

#171. I shut my eyes in order to see. – Paul Gauguin

#172. Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. – Keith Haring

#173. There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about. – Helen Frankenthaler

#174. Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know. ― Rembrandt

#175. The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. – Auguste Rodin

#176. I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work. – Mary Cassatt

#177. The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration. – Claude Monet

#178. If the artist has outer and inner eyes for nature, nature rewards him by giving him inspiration. – Wassily Kandinsky

#179. I saw the angel in the marble and carved it until I set him free. – Michelangelo

#180. Art is a line around your thoughts. – Gustav Klimt

#181. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ― Pablo Picasso

#182. The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of. ― Leonardo da Vinci

#183. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ― Stella Adler

#184. Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. – Leonardo da Vinci

#185. Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing. – Georgia O’Keeffe

#186. I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child. – Jean-Michel Basquiat

#187. We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents. – Bob Ross

#188. The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist. ― Eric Gill

#189. The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature. – George Inness

#190. The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was ‘beauty’. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile. ― Roger Scruton

#191. Every artist was first an amateur. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

#192. You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life. ― Joan Miro

#193. Great art picks up where nature ends. – Marc Chagall

#194. Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see – to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than merely looking with the eye. ― Kimon Nicolaides

#195. I have a flood of ideas in my mind. I just follow my vision. – Yayoi Kusama

#196. It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive. – Louise Bourgeois

#197. To be an artist is to believe in life. – Henry Moore

#198. Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist. – René Magritte

Funny Art Quotes

#200. Television has a real problem. They have no page two. – Art Buchwald

#201. The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives. – Albert Einstein

#202. The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed – it is a process of elimination. – Elbert Hubbard

#203. If you hear a voice within you saying, ”You are not a painter,” then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced. ― Vincent van Gogh

#204. Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death. – Earl Wilson

#205. Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things: landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory. ― David Gentleman

#206. In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising? – Sarah Jessica Parker

#207. Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

#208. Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. – Frank Lloyd Wright

#209. Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it. – Salvador Dalí

#210. One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil. ― Balthus

#211. Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. ― Edgar Degas

#212. Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself. ― John Berger

#213. People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were. – Edward R. Murrow

#214. The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. – Anatole France

#215. Tell me what company thou keepest, and I’ll tell thee what thou art. – Miguel de Cervantes

#216. Love isn’t an emotion or an instinct – it’s an art. – Mae West

#217. Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art. You can change your life anytime if you aren’t enjoying the dream. – don Miguel Ruiz

#218. Stay firmly in your path and dare. Be wild two hours a day! ― Paul Gauguin

#219. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials. – Lin Yutang

#220. Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television. – Woody Allen

#221. Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries. – Jimmy Carter

#222. The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

#223. How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it. ― Juliette Aristides

#224. Passions are not found, they are developed. ― Unknown

To get over a lousy piece of work they believed would turn out nicely or to overcome an artist’s block, any artist, novice or experienced, will need a little pick-me-up every now and again. From artists to philosophers, scientists to photographers, these are some of my favorite inspirational statements about art. Everyone needs art in their life to express themselves creatively. Art is a means of expressing one’s innermost ideas and emotions. It’s a tool for self-reflection and contemplation of the larger world.

A wide variety of media are used to create art, including painting, sculpture, photography, and even writing. Art has the power to link us to others and the world around us in a meaningful way. Our emotions and inner selves can also benefit from it. Many artists use painting as a means of communicating their deepest ideas and feelings. From some of the world’s most renowned painters, here are some of the finest quotations on art that we could find.