quotes

I’ve been collecting quotes about art, creativity, and life for years. This page contains a few of them

Get inspired and art on!
Clint

WORDS OF WISDOM COLLECTION

“A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.”
Hedy Lamarr
"A line is a dot that went for a walk."
Paul Klee
"A picture is a poem without words."
Horace
"A picture means I know where I was every minute." That’s why I take pictures." It’s a visual diary."
Andy Warhol
"A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others."
Salvador Dali
"A true masterpiece does not tell everything."
Albert Camus
"A work is finished when an artist realizes his intentions."
Rembrandt
"A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity."
Rainer Maria Rilke
“All art is erotic.”
Gustav Klimt
“An art book is a museum without walls.”
Andre Malraux
“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.”
James McNeill Whistler
"An empty canvas is full."
Robert Rauschenberg
“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
Charles Bukowski
"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way." An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
Charles Bukowski
“And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.”
Aristotle
"Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep."
Clive Barker
“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
Clive Barker
“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”
Alfred North Whitehead
"Art can never exist without Naked Beauty displayed."
William Blake
“Art depends on luck and talent.”
Francis Ford Coppola
“Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.”
David Hockney
"Art is a house that tries to be haunted."
Emily Dickinson
"Art is a jealous mistress."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Art is a line around your thoughts."
Gustav Klimt
"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
“Art is anything you can get away with.”
Andy Warhol
“Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.”
John Updike
"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, Italian polymath & painter
"Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth."
George Sand
“Art is not a thing; it is a way.”
Elbert Hubbard
"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."
Edgar Degas
"Art is the greatest form of hope."
Banksy
“Art is the most beautiful of all lies.”
Claude Debussy
"Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." Twyla Tharp
"Art is to console those who are broken by life."
Vincent Van Gogh
“Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.”
Keith Haring
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
Banksy
"Art, freedom, and creativity will change society faster than politics." Victor Pinchuk
“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”
James Baldwin
“Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.”
Al Hirschfeld
"Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons." Al Hirschfeld
"Artists are the monks of the bourgeois society."
Cesare Pavese
“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”
Andrew Carnegie
“Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.”
Jean Rostand
"Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting."
Winston Churchill
"Being gay is like glitter. It never goes away."
Lady Gaga
"Color is a power which directly influences the soul." Wassily Kandinsky
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
Brené Brown
"Creative work is a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got."
Steven Pressfield
“Creativity is contagious, pass it on.”
Albert Einstein
"Creativity is intelligence having fun." Albert Einstein
“Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.”
Bill Viola
"Creativity takes courage."
Henri Matisse
"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
Oscar Wilde
“Don’t be afraid to be a poppy in a field of daffodils.”
Michael Arditti
"Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth."
Rumi
"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value." Arthur Miller
“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."
Andy Warhol
"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
“Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.”
Austin Kleon
"Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence."
Henri Matisse
“Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.”
Keith Haring
"Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache." David Hockney
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
C.S. Lewis
"Every artist was first an amateur."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every artist was first an amateur." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every child has the spirit of creation." The rubbish of life often exterminates the spirit through plague and a soul’s own wretchedness." Peter Paul Rubens
“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.”
Don Miguel Ruiz
“Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.”
Austin Kleon
"Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas."
Austin Kleon
“Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.”
Giotto di Bondone
“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
David Cronenberg
“Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.”
Alfred North Whitehead
"Gender preference does not define you. Your spirit defines you."
P.C. Cast
“Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.”
George Jean Nathan
“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
Vincent Van Gogh
"Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it." Salvador Dali
“He who works with his hands is a labourer. 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
"How beauty varies in nature and art! In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh."
Victor Hugo, 1802-1885, French writer
“How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take people to see that? We’re all in this rat race together!”
Marsha P. Johnson
"I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write." Jeanette Winterson
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
Pablo Picasso
"I am my best work a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines."
Audre Lorde
"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept."
Angela Davis
"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."
Louisa May Alcott
“I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”
Vincent van Gogh
"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all."
James Baldwin
"I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do."
Bob Ross
"I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.”
Jackson Pollock
“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
Will Rogers
"I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things."
Henri Matisse
“I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.”
David Hockney
“I find the nights long, for I sleep but little, and think much.”
Charles Dickens
“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
“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.”
Marlene Dietrich
"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection."
Thomas Paine
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
Marsha P. Johnson
“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.”
Konstantin Stanislavski
"Where there is great love there are always miracles."
Willa Cather
“We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
Bob Ross
“There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.”
Leonardo da Vinci
"The things that make us different, those are our superpowers."
Lena Waithe
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
Anton Chekhov
"When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free."
Barack Obama
"It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world."
Oscar Wilde
“In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.” Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.”
Henry David Thoreau
“My whole premise has been, right from the beginning, that it would take me a lifetime to learn to explain myself as an artist. As you grow older, you learn what to do and what to leave out. You kind of simplify your work and get the same thing done with fewer strokes.”
Tony Bennett
"If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all."
Michelangelo
"What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence."
Claude Monet
"To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay."
Gertrude Stein
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
US Declaration of Independence
“The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”
Gertrude Stein
"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth."
John F. Kennedy
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
Alfred Eisenstaedt
"You don’t make art out of good intentions."
Gustave Flaubert
"You are your best thing."
Toni Morrison
“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
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
Francis Bacon
“There’s only now, there’s only here
Give in to love or live in fear
No other path, No other way
No day but today…”
From RENT
Written by Jonathan Larson
“We are all in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Oscar Wilde
“One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.”
Andrew Wyeth“
“So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.”
Countee Cullen
“In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”
Andy Warhol
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
Leonardo da Vinci
"You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have."
Maya Angelou
“The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.”
Bette Davis“
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
Andy Warhol“
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
Michelangelo
“One of my mantras is, ‘Embrace what makes you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable.’ I keep that with me in my back pocket. Shoot, I keep it in my front pocket! I keep it in my hair.”
Janelle Monae
“If I knew what the picture was going to be like, I wouldn’t make it.”
Cindy Sherman
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
Alice Walker
"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
“One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”
Jean Cocteau
“The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”
David Hockney“
"If I wait for someone else to validate my existence, it will mean that I’m shortchanging myself."
Zanele Muholi
“Si Vis Amari Ama” = “If You Want To Love Love”
Latin Phrase
“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
“It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.”
Wilson Mizner
"If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing."
Marc Chagall
"My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness."
Maya Angelou
"Originality is nothing but judicious imitation."
Voltaire
“Vision is the true creative rhythm.”
Robert Delaunay
"Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.”
Claude Cahun
"The artist works by locating the world in himself."
Gertrude Stein
“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”
George Bernard Shaw
“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.”
Eric Gill
“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”
Oscar Wilde
“Stay firmly in your path and dare; be wild two hours a day!”
Paul Gauguin
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
Mark Twain
“My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly.”
Raoul Dufy
"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."
Stella Adler
“Most people are so busy doing what they must do, that they never have the opportunity to find out what they can do.”
Leonard Nimoy
“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again..."
Theodore Roosevelt
“The miracle is this: The more we share the more we have.”
Leonard Nimoy
"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
Audre Lorde
"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."
Oscar Wilde
"Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution."
Karl Kraus
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein
“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.”
Oscar Wilde
“Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.”
Edgar Degas
“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”
Dolly Parton
“No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time, it’s just that others are behind the times.”
Martha Graham
“The goal of art was the vital expression of self.”
Alfred Stieglitz
"You don’t take a photograph, you make it."
Ansel Adams
"Ideas are like rabbits." You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
John Steinbeck
"I paint flowers so they will not die." Frida Kahlo
"My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all."
John Lennon
“Some people see things that are and ask, ‘Why?’ Some people dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’ Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.”
George Carlin
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
Aristotle
“If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”
Arnold Schoenberg
"The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul."
Wassily Kandinsky
“I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.”
Marc Chagall
“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.”
Jim Morrison
“I was raised with the Bible Belt mentality, and by coming to California, I came out of this dark place and unlearned a lot of things I’d been taught.”
Ed Ruscha
"She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something."
Rainbow Rowell
"It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist."
Laverne Cox
"The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before."
Neil Gaiman
“I realize that every picture isn’t a work of art.”
Conrad Hall
“Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.”
Franz Liszt
“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
Louise Bourgeois
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."
Oscar Wilde
"Imagination is the beginning of creation."
George Bernard Shaw
“We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.”
David Hockney
“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
Unknown
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world of ours: children and art.”
Stephen Sondheim
“In art as in love, instinct is enough.”
Anatole France
"Queer art is as much about starting conversations as it is about making dramatic statements."
Sasha Velour
“Simpler Is Better”
Unknown
“We create our buildings and then they create us. Likewise, we construct our circle of friends and our communities and then they construct us.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
Audre Lorde
“Sometimes, people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, so what. That is one of my favourite things to say. So what.”
Andy Warhol
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.“
Pablo Picasso
"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
“Success is a worn down pencil.”
Robert Rauschenberg
“Most artists like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, as independent characters.”
Jack Levine
"It's better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you're not."
André Gide
"The only queer people are those who don't love anybody."
Rita Mae Brown
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
Marcus Aurelius
“It’s very easy to look at the world and think, this is all so cruel and so mean. It’s important to not become bitter from it.”
RuPaul Charles
“I will preach with my brush.”
Henry Ossawa Tanner
“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
Charles Mingus
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Bayard Rustin
“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.”
Henry David Thoreau
"Passions are not found, they are developed." Unknown
"We should indeed keep calm in the face of difference, and live our lives in a state of inclusion and wonder at the diversity of humanity."
George Takei
"The beauty of standing up for your rights is others see you standing and stand up as well."
Cassandra Duffy
"Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still."
Dorothea Lange
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
Orson Welles
"Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."
Oscar Wilde
“Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.”
Rembrandt
"New moon on Monday
And a fire dance through the night
I stayed the cold day with a lonely satellite
Duran Duran
“I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.”
Frida Kahlo
"in my world, every human is beautiful."
Zanele Muholi
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
"In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself."
Frantz Fanon
"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.”
Carl Jung
"Ideas come from everything."
Alfred Hitchcock
"To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist."
Robert Schuman
“The portrait of my parents is a complicated one, but lovingly drawn.”
Joyce Maynard
"Practice what you know and it will help you to make clean what you do not know."
Rembrandt
“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
Salvador Dali
"The most beautiful makeup for a woman is passion. But cosmetics are easier to buy."
Yves Saint Laurent
“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.”
Oscar Wilde
"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible, and childish but that’s only if it’s done properly."
Banksy
“I’m interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.”
David Hockney
“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.”
Piet Mondrian
"When I am completely myself, entirely alone during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly."
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it.”
Ai Weiwei