Art Quotes

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

~ Kamand Kojouri

sacred knowledge of the cosmos seems to be hidden within our souls and is shown within our artwork and creative expressions.

~ Nikki Shiva

One of the best ways to recharge is by simply being in the presence of art. No thoughts, no critiques. Just full-on absorption mode.

~ Dean Francis Alfar

In those glorious moments when someone sees, really sees, your art and bothers to tell you so, relish it!

~ Teresa R. Funke

If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

~ Benjamin Wood

Ha! spring arrived on her sweet scented palanquin,carried by the spirited Zephyrus and his coir with their murmuring music undulated in its own softness and fondled the leaves to astir.

~ Nithin Purple

Better farPursue a frivolous trade by serious means,Than a sublime art frivolously.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Our art is never really ours. Each person who experiences it brings to it a piece of themselves and reacts to it in ways that stem from their personal struggles, beliefs, morals, and even hang-ups.

~ Teresa R. Funke

A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture.

~ Anonymous

A basic premise of Expressionism was that mise-en-scène - the visual space of the film (as well as of fiction, theatrical presentation, and painting) - should express the stressed psychological state of either its main character, or more universally, the culture at large. Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) best exemplifies this effect, though it actually predates and influenced the Expressionist movement. This painting of a figure on a bridge, standing in front of a violent multicolored sky, hands held up in anxiety and terror, is a dominant image for the twentieth century. It encapsulates the Expressionist desire to make the world a reflection of the interior anguish it has caused.

~ Robert Kolker

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said, Me? No, I'm not creative. I would be gazillionaire. The thing is, that's not really them talking, it's their jerkface inner critic. Okay, so maybe you haven't made anything in a very long time, but that doesn't mean you're not creative. What it means is that, somewhere along the way, you became really good at saying Me? No, I'm not creative.

~ Danielle Krysa

Oh Maker, what did they really say about your black creation? I think you made a beautiful work of art on a canvass of rebellion. Hey, Maker! We are still selling out!

~ Chinonye J. Chidolue

Love is the most primal force in the universe. It inspires us, pulling us over otherwise insurmountable obstacles. Art is created to exalt it, children are born of it, and entire lives are devoted to seeking it out in the most unlikely places.

~ C. Robert Cargill

If you’re going to be an artist, you’ve got to make your work your best friend, that you can go to whatever you’re feeling, and have a conversation with it.

~ Maggie Hambling

An artist who desires very little and achieves it has failed in life.

~ Paulo Coelho

When an image depends on the next for a complete meaning, it moves the story and audience along without choking them with pathos

~ Val Uchendu

All art forms possess liberty beyond space and time, yet grounded by urgency of now, and a breath of truth.

~ Val Uchendu

The purpose of art is to create heavens to balance the world because there are so many hells in the world, there are wars, tortures and oppressions, there is unhappiness etc.

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Let's make room for the kind of art that challenges us, pushes boundaries, stirs and inspires, and takes our breath away with its uniqueness. Let's reconnect with our artist souls and trust that if we make good art, we'll make good money.

~ Teresa R. Funke

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. The creative urge lives and grows in him like a tree in the earth from which it draws its nourishment.

~ C.g. Jung

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking.

~ C.g. Jung

There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for.

~ L.m. Montgomery

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

~ Bruce Springsteen

It's about what I know is true. Because I'm looking at this bright red storm of color on a canvas, at all my delicate lines and passionate brushstrokes. I'm looking at something so urgent and true, so far beyond what I thought I was capable of making.

~ Nina Lacour

We are all creative beings. The act of creating puts us in direct connection with the greatest creator. The master artist that is our Divine Creator.

~ Eileen Anglin

And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not... through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and forever, those divine and raptorous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Art is love made public.

~ Hernando Fuentes

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

~ Oscar Wilde

Every gesture and every look he gives me takes me by surprise and causes my heart to stutter.

~ Ashley Earley

You must study the Masters but guard the original style that beats within your soul and put to sword those who would try to steal it.

~ El Greco

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

~ Zadie Smith

If you want to have a golden signature, create a good art!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I adore the elegance of botanical realism but I also can't help but dream of my very own neo-surrealistic fantasy flowers, and so I paint and illustrate both; I always find myself between both of those worlds.

~ Minnelli Lucy France

A painting is worth a thousand confused art-gallery visitors.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

... and I submit to you, that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artist embraces the fruits of those discoveries.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

This time when she picked up her paints, she didn’t think, she just painted. It was like opening the door onto a storm. The canvas was her doorway and the paint all the thunder and lightning, the wild pain-filled sky caught inside her.

~ Michelle Frost

I freeze, my feet suddenly glued to the floor. It takes me a minute to gather the courage to turn around, but when I do, I immediately wish I hadn't. The boy is standing in the doorway at the end of the hall.Why is he here again? I barely allow myself time to ask the question before I move. Panicked, I turn and run back downstairs as fast as I can.Hey! Wait! he calls after me.I don't stop.

~ Ashley Earley

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.

~ Tony Tulathimutte

So 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

I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.

~ Tristan Tzara