Art / Artist- Quotes

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it. - W. H. Auden

A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts. - Joseph Addison

A peculiar work in any art must not be too hastily judged. New styles have to create new tastes. - Christian Nestell Bovee

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. - Theodore Adorno

All art is autobiographical. - Federico Fellini

All science touches on art; all art has its scientific side. - Armand Trousseau

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t usually know why they chose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. - William Faulkner

An artist is completely amoral in that he will rob, beg, borrow, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. - William Faulkner

An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks would be a good idea to give them. - Andy Warhol

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along. - Evelyn Waugh

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

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to market it. - Samuel Butler

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. - Jean-Luc Godard

Art consists in making others feel what we feel. - Fernado Pessoa

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. - G. K. Chesterton

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

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

Art has got nothing to do with taste. - Max Ernst

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. it follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck. - Donald Barthelme

Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist. - Paul Gauguin

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

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand. - Nadine Gordimer 

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. - Kahlil Gibran

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality. - Robert M. Pirsig

Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it. - Frank Zappa

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced. - Leo Tolstoy

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it. - Bertolt Brecht

Art is one of man's few serious activities. - Austin O’Malley

Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express? - Lewis Foreman Day

Art is really people asking the eternal question, “What is it all about?” - Gene Roddenberry

Art is the imposing of pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern. - Alfred North Whitehead

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth. - Anais Nin

Art is the Queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world. - Leonardo da Vinci

Art is the signature of man. - G.K. Chesterton

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 colours flowers, so does art colour life. - John Lubbock

Art is what you can get away with. - Andy Warhol

Art never expresses anything but itself. - Oscar Wilde

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always becomes ugly with time. - Jean Cocteau

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

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. - G. K. Chesterton

Art, true 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

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move. - Dan Simmons

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art. - Ferran Adria

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs. - Edgard Varèse

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see. - Edgar Degas

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. - Salvador Dali

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

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene. - John Barth

Every artist was first an amateur. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist writes his own autobiography. - Havelock Ellis

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. - Oscar Wilde

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. - W. Somerset Maugham

Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent – I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space. - Robert Fulghum

Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself. - H.P. Lovecraft

Good artists copy; great artists steal. - Pablo Picasso

Great art picks up where nature ends. - Marc Chagall

Great artists need great clients. - I. M. Pei

Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. - Leo Tolstoy

How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp or the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it,so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for. - Julian Barnes

I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision. - Mary Oliver

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life. - Jean-Michel Basquiat

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. - John F. Kennedy

If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint. - Edward Hopper

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way? - Fluke Greville

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. - Honore De Balzac

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently. - Walter Isaacson

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art there are two principal schools between which each aspirant has to choose – one distinguished by its close adherence to nature, and the other by its strenuous efforts to get above it. - Christian Nestell

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. - Anais Nin

It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into awareness. - Michael Crichton

Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is. - Cory Arcangel

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. - Oscar Wilde

Maybe the judgment of whether something is art or not should come from the viewer and not the doer. - Alan Babbitt

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

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist. - Unknown

One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless. - Donald Barthelme

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

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

Painting is silent poetry. - Plutarch

Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into worlds. - Laurie Anderson

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? - Aldous Huxley

Sanity (in the everyday sense of the word) is not an essential quality of great art. - Gerald Abraham

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. - Tom Stoppard

Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it.... It's a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are a spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be an artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see. - Ann Patchett

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

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. - William Faulkner

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. - Ursula LeGuin

The artist does not really create; he discovers. - Lyman Abbott

The artist finds a greater pleasure in painting than in having completed the picture. - Lucius Seneca

The artist is a receptacle for the 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. - Pablo Picasso

That art is best which suggests most. - Austin O’Malley

The artist is justified by his art. - Lewis Foreman Day

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels. - E. E. Cummings

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist. - Eric Gill

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. - Emile Zola

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

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run downhill. -  W. Somerset Maugham

The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes. - Andre Gide

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation. - Michelle Obama

The function of the artist is to provide what life does not. - Tom Robbins

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. - Theodor W. Adorno

The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed. - John Chamberlain

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. - H. L. Mencken

The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. - Ernest Hemingway

The human body is the best work of art. - Jess C. Scott

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent…there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed. - Virginia Woolf

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others. Vincent van Gogh

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. - Albert Einstein

The noblest art is that of making others happy. - P. T. Barnum

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment. - Tennessee Williams

The painting rises from the brush strokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later. - Joan Miro

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

The real artist’s work is a surprise to himself. - Robert Henri

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication. - Cyril Connolly

The scope of art is practically boundless; it does not begin and end with the painting of pictures and the modelling of statues; where there is room for workmanship there is room for it. - Lewis Foreman Day

The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence. - George Henry Lewes

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple – to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it. - Craig Raine

The way to art was not to think too clearly, not to plan things out, but to follow where your heart and emotions led. - Paul Park

The work of art is above all a process of creation. - Paul Klee

The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes. - Leonardo da Vinci

The act of painting is not a duplication of experience but the extension of experience on the plane of formal invention. - Stuart Davis

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

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

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

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist’s work. - Harold Rosenberg

Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist’s career. - E.A. Bucchianeri 

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art. - Leonardo da Vinci

While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. - Ray Bradbury

With the pride of an artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance. - Norman Mailer

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

You don’t have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day. - Viggo Mortensen

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search. - Rick Riordan

You're an artist ... that means you see the world in ways that other people don't. It's your gift, to see the beauty and the horror in ordinary things. It doesn't make you crazy – just different. There's nothing wrong with being different. - Cassandra Clare