Art Quotes

I’m a big fan of quotations, so I decided to post my favorites here, including a few by yours truly.

“There are no rules, only materials.”
-Yow! (get this quotation imprinted on a variety of apparel and gift items)

“Art is not just some guy’s name.”
-Yow! (get this quotation imprinted on a variety of apparel and gift items)

“Art is a leap into the dark.”
-Yow!

“To create is to celebrate one’s connection to the cosmos.”
-Yow! (get this quotation imprinted on a variety of apparel and gift items)

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
- Ansel Adams

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” – Howard Ikemoto

“The artist should never try to be popular. Rather the public should be more artistic.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Do not fear mistakes; there are none.”
– Miles Davis

“Let the beauty of what you love be the beauty of what you do.”
– Rumi

”The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”
- Christopher Morley

“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint … and that voice will be silenced, but only by working.”
- Vincent van Gogh

“Keep your eye on your inner world and keep away from ads, idiots and movie stars.”
-Dorothea Tanning

Truth is a fire, and to speak the truth means to shine and burn.
- Gustave Klimt

“All good ideas arrive by chance.”
- Max Ernst

“Art, to me, is a question. It should never be an answer.”
- Marilyn Manson

“An artist can accomplish anything provided he doesn’t accept facts or defeat for more than a few minutes.”
- John Cassavetes

“The only limits are, as always, those of vision.”
- James Broughton

“The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.”
- André Malraux”

“No one looks at a flower garden and tears their hair out trying to figure out what it means.”
- Jackson Pollock

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”
– Susan Sontag

“If I didn’t think what I was doing had something to do with enlarging the boundaries of art, I wouldn’t go on doing it.”
- Claes Oldenburg

“In every culture, in every time, artists have always been the weather vanes, the truth-tellers, the bearers of beauty, and the ones who make visible the invisible values of their world.”
- Cay Lang

“Art has always been the raft onto ‘which we climb to save our sanity.”
- Dorothea Tanning

“It does not matter how badly you paint, so long as you don’t paint badly like other people.”
– George Moore

“Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.”
– Oscar Wilde

“As for famous men who were not artists, I am beginning to be tired of them. Those poor little scoundrels who are called great men fill me with nothing but overwhelming horror.”
- Franz Liszt

“I do not want to go until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me.”
- Kãthe Kollwitz

“Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.”
- Jasper Johns

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

“All art is a revolt against man’s fate.”
- André Malraux

“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
- G. K. Chesterton

“Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.”
- George J. Nathan

“We have art in order not to perish of truth.”
- Nietzsche

“Those who know don’t talk. Those who talk don’t know.”
- Lao Tzu

“If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”
- Isadora Duncan

“The secret of a creation can be realised only in our own actually creating.”
-Benjamin Blood

“The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls ‘inspiration.’”-Leon Trotsky

“If it is art, it is not for all. If it is for all, it is not art.”
-Schõnberg

“There is no “must” in art, which is ever free.”
-Kandinsky

“In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically.”
-Van Gogh

“Painting is a way to knowledge. So are all the arts.”
-Morris Graves

“You paint the way you have to in order to give, that’s life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.”
-Franz Kline

“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I’m overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon or the sun.”
-Miro

“Nothing but the astonishing is beautiful.”
-Andre Breton

“If men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.”
-Albert Camus

“In a moment of grace, we can grasp eternity in the palm of our hand. This is the gift given to creative individuals who can identify with the mysteries of life through art.”
-Marcel Marceau

“There are certain mysteries, certain secrets, in my own work which even I don’t understand, nor do I try to do so.”
-Georges Braque

“The artist is the confidante of nature.”
-Rodin

“The ordinary logic of the real world is pushing us to catastrophe. What the artist is trying to do is to get free of that doom.”
-Bram van Velde

“If the world were clear, art would not exist.”
-Albert Camus

“We are a tiny little twig of the mammalian tree, an afterthought. Nature was not made for us.”
-Stephen Gould

“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
-H. L. Mencken

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

“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”
-Da Vinci

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

“There was a young lady named Bright whose speed was much faster than light. She set out one day in a relative way and returned the previous night.”
-Anonymous

“I used to believe in reincarnation, but that was in a past life.”
-Paul Krassner

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”
-Da Vinci

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

“What was my fundamental face before I was born?”
-Zen Koan-

“Well, art is art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh… Now you tell me what you know.”
-Groucho Marx

“The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.”
-Goethe

“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.”
-Pablo Picasso

“Creation is a drug I can’t do without.”
-Cecil B. DeMille

“It is wise to learn; it is God-like to create.”
-John Saxe

“Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.”
-Jean Arp

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
-Albert Einstein

“Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.”
-Paul Klee

“Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
-Picasso

“For me, art begins when there is something left that cannot be explained.”
-Moshe Kupferman

“It only takes an instant for an impression to become a vision.”
-Bill Viola

“A cathedral that is falling down, has all those wonderful bricks with which to build.”
-James Hubbell

“Do you think I know what I am doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it’s writing, or the ball can guess where it’s going next.”
-Rumi

“The man who cannot visualise a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.”
-Andre Breton

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it is the source of all true art and science.”
-Albert Einstein

“Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration.”
-Igor Stravinsky

“What am I in the eyes of most people? A good for nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man. Somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.”
-Vincent van Gogh

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

“Art is the center of the real world.”
-Isaiah Zagar

“Trash is simply a failure of imagination.”
-Neil Benson

“Creativity, to me, is basically closing one’s eyes and letting it happen.”
-Ellen Sall

‎”I am preparing myself, through my art, for the possibility of not being.”
- Bertille de Baudiniere