To create is to be in touch with the divine, but no matter how creative we are, sometimes we just lack inspiration. That’s why I I’ve collected the most inspirational art quotes about artistic expression to fuel your creative endeavors. Let’s get started!
Top Inspirational Art Quotes
1. “A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.” ― Salvador Dali
2. “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” ― Aristotle
3. “Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see but what our mind understands.” ― Millard Sheets
4. “The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” — Julia Cameron
5. “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
6. “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” — Pablo Picasso
7. “Art must be an expression of love, or it is nothing.” — Marc Chagall
8. “I paint flowers so they will not die.” — Frida Kahlo
9. “If people only knew how hard I work to gain my mastery. It wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” ― Michelangelo
10. “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.” — André Gide
Inspirational Quotes On Art
Stay with me because more inspirational art quotes are coming your way!
1. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” — Edgar Degas
2. “Every artist was first an amateur.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. “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
4. “When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a ‘get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about.” ― Jackson Pollock
5. “Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.” — Edgard Varese
6. “As I work at 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
7. “It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.” ― Albert Einstein
8. “There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can’t stand Picasso, those who can’t stand Raphael, and those who have never heard of either.” — John White
9. “To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” — Osho
10. “I make art to show my soul that I am listening.” — Pat Wiederspan Jones
11. “Colour is my day-long obsession, joy, and torment.” ― Claude Monet
12. “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
13. “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
14. “Inhale possibility, exhale creativity.” — Laura Jaworski
15. “Art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks.” — Mark Rothko
16. “Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art.” — Margot Fonteyn
17. “Art is like therapy; what comes up is what comes up. It may be dark, but that’s what comes up. You may want to keep some of it in a drawer… but never judge it.” — Nick Bantock
18. “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time.” — Martha Graham
19. “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.” — George Bernard Shaw
20. “Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” — Martha Graham
See also: The 280 Best Dance Captions To Awaken The Dancer In You
Beautiful Quotes For Art
Next up is a collection of beautiful and inspirational art quotes to add a little sunshine to your day.
1. “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” — Oscar Wilde
2. “Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination, and encourages people to go further.” — Keith Haring
3. “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
4. “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
5. “Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.” ― Henry Ward Beecher
6. “How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it.” ― Juliette Aristides
7. “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
8. “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
9. “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
10. “Learn the craft of knowing how to open your heart and turn on your creativity. There’s a light inside of you.” — Judith Jamison
11. “I invent nothing, I rediscover.” — Auguste Rodin
12. “The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow.” — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
13. “We create because we seemingly have no choice but to be creative.” — Cherie Haas
14. “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
15. “To seek beauty is our nature. To create beauty is to align with the universe and be transported.” — LeAura Alderson
16. “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” — Leonardo da Vinci
17. “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” — Charles Mingus
18. “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.” — Paul Strand
19. “Art is the material manifestation of ethereal connections, shared by all people.” — Tyler Clawson
20. “Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter’s or sculptor’s work.” — Florence Nightingale
See also: 150 Proud To Be A Nurse Quotes That Are Sure To Impress
Inspiring Artist Quotes
These inspirational art quotes talk about what it means to be an artist. Have a look!
1. “Practice what you know, and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.” ― Rembrandt
2. “The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” ― Neil Gaiman
3. “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.” — Emile Zola
4. “Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want.” ― Gustav Klimt
5. “Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential… Creativity is the power to act.” — Ai Weiwei
6. “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso
7. “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” — Peter O’Toole
8. “The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” — Woody Allen
9. “The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.” — George Bernard Shaw
10. “It is not enough to know your craft, you have to have a feeling. Science is all very well, but for us, imagination is worth far more.” ― Edouard Manet
11. “Art is art, isn’t it? And 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.” — Groucho Marx
12. “Artistic talent is a gift from God, and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.” — Pope John Paul II
13. “An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success.” — Henri Matisse
14. “The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.” — Paul Gauguin
15. “The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.” — Paul Cézanne
Quotes On Art And Life
Below you’ll find some truly remarkable and inspirational art quotes about art and life.
1. “Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.” ― Stella Adler
2. “Amateurs look for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Chuck Close
3. “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” — John F. Kennedy
4. “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
5. “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.” — G. K . Chesterton
6. “An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them.” — Andy Warhol
7. “Art is my life and my life is art.” — Yoko Ono
8. “There is a vitality, a life force, energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.” — Martha Graham
9. “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” — Albert Camus
10. “Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
11. “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.” — St. Francis of Assisi
12. “To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. So do it.” — Kurt Vonnegut
13. “I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.” — Jean-Michel Basquiat
14. “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” — Marc Chagall
15. “Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.” — Erich Fromm
16. “The great geniuses are those who have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it a breadth of vision and experience.” — Alfred Stieglitz
17. “Learning to take risks is an essential aspect of being creative with color.” — Brian Keeler
18. “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
19. “A picture is a work of art, not because it is ‘modern,’ nor because it is ‘ancient,’ but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling.” — John F. Carlson
20. “Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” — Edvard Munch
See also: 150 Nature Captions For Instagram For All The Nature Lovers
Deep & Inspirational Art Quotes
Check out my collection of deep and inspirational art quotes.
1. “The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.” — Wassily Kandinsky
2. “One eye sees, the other feels.” — Paul Klee
3. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams
4. “It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.” — Paul Cézanne
5. “What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.” — Marcel Duchamp
6. “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
7. “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” — Pablo Picasso
8. “Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.” — Maya Angelou
9. “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
10. “If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” — Edward Hopper
11. “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” — Robert Hughes
12. “Painting a sunset is an act of faith. If you wait for it to happen, you’re too late.” — Aaron Schuerr
13. “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” — Salvador Dali
14. “To me, defeat in anything is merely temporary. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.” — Bruce Lee
15. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton
16. “There will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’ while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred the inspiration to information.” — Man Ray
17. “Follow your passion. Find something that makes you want to work at it. Work hard. Nothing comes without hard work.” — Tomas Schramek
18. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” — Albert Einstein
19. “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” — Leo Burnett
20. “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” — Edgar Allan Poe
See also: 150 Deep Dark Quotes About Life, Death, Pain & Love
Powerful Inspirational Art Quotes
I saved something special for the end. Here are 15 truly powerful and inspirational art quotes everyone should read.
1. “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.” — Vincent van Gogh
2. “The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner than the average person.” — Frank Barron
3. “Artists are rebels against the grain of society no matter what they choose to do.”— Dean Nimmer
4. “Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.” ― Marc Davis
5. “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
6. “Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.” — Edward Albee
7. “There are three things that are important: feeling, imagination, and the means to communicate.” — Everett Raymond Kinstler
8. “Art never comes from happiness.” — Chuck Palahniuk
9. “Do not fear mistakes – there are none.” — Miles David
10. “The artist is the lover of nature; therefore, he is her slave and her master.” — Rabindranath Tagore
11. “Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still until your eyes ache.” ― David Hockney
12. “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.” — Frida Kahlo
13. “The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.” ― Joan Miro
14. “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your surprise, that you have rendered something in its true character.” ― Camille Pissarro
15. “Flowers are the music of the ground from earth’s lips spoken without sound.” — Edwin Curran
See also: 140 Beautiful Flower Captions To Make Your Post Stand Out
In Conclusion
That was all for today’s article on inspirational art quotes. I’d love to know who is your favorite artist is and what’s your favorite art quote.
Share it in the comments section below. Let’s continue inspiring!
Until next time!
