Art Quotes

When you steal from an artist you are stealing their blood, sweat and tears.

~ Tyler Shields

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

~ William Saroyan

The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell.

~ Steven Pressfield

The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.

~ Kuo Pao Kun

When a man devotes himself body and spirit to a single object, if he has training and aptitude, no matter how mediocre he may be in ordinary affairs, he will produce something so nearly akin to a work of genius as to deceive half the judges who think themselves competent to decide between genius and talent.(The Phantom Model)

~ Hume Nisbet

An artist's concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better.

~ Yourleo

Instead of chasing the idea of truth, what we should be doing is embracing the medium of drawing and using it for a purpose that fulfils our needs as an artist or designer.

~ Peter Stanyer

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.

~ Robert Henri

The soul of an artist cannot be muted indefinitely. It must either be expressed or it will consume the host.

~ Gerard De Marigny

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

~ Mark Rothko

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

~ Alice Neel

No. Not yet. A craftsman only. But I dream to be an artist. I pray that someday, if I work with enough care, if I am very very lucky, I will make a weapon that is a work of art. Call me an artist then, and I will answer.

~ William Goldman

Art is ment to travel from your heart to your head and out through your fingers...

~ Kelly Bingham

The more I drive myself into the depth of my inside, the more things come up to my vision, visibly or invisibly... I even do not know if I am seeing them with my eye or with my mind. I just need to copy them on my canvases. But this mental process is always overwhelming. I often have hard time to deal with my emotion on this state. You could call this depression on surface? But actually, so many 're-birth' and 'reform' are going on on my thoughts, inspiration, philosophy...etc in the underwater. I believe this struggle make my art real. My art always comes from my emotion.

~ Hiroko Sakai

In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, I AM HERE... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?

~ Hiroko Sakai

Wherever I wander off to, when I draw, when I paint, I get my life back. I am lucky that I am an Artist.

~ Hiroko Sakai

A good artist should laugh often!

~ François Place

my problem is that my body acts before my brain thinks... it sometimes brings me huge trouble, or also huge success. recently, my body and brain got come to an agreement. it may be far better to live this gambling life than living in boring average ...they at least make my art more interesting

~ Hiroko Sakai

ONLY' having the Gift, people appreciate this madness as Art. Everybody wants to have Art in their lives, but no body wants to have what the Art came out from in their lives...

~ Hiroko Sakai

When a mad man found some certain way to express his insanity in original way, he would get promoted to be called an Artist.... Wait, are you talking about me?

~ Hiroko Sakai

Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.

~ Konstantin Stanislavski

The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface

~ Lisa Renee Jones

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.

~ Marina Abramović

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him.

~ J.m. Coetzee

[Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

~ Audrey Niffenegger

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and 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 be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is on a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

~ Martha Graham

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

I think her favorite thing about our . . . collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

I noticed that religion gave some people a way to escape dealing with the world: “Things will be better when you die,” the people of my grandma’s generation said as they worked themselves to death. “God wants you to forgive and love those who do you wrong,” some people said to shake off the shame of being unable to respond to the abuse they endured. The holier-than-thou faction found comfort in believing, “The rest of y’all are lost because you don’t have a personal relationship with God—our God.” But art engages you in the world, not just the world around you but the big world, and not just the big world of Tokyo and Sydney and Johannesburg, but the bigger world of ideas and concepts and feelings of history and humanity.

~ Wynton Marsalis

There are enough ideas, images, symbols, and experiences in your head already to work with for a lifetime. It's a little like having a car with an unpredictable battery, though. Sometimes you get in and it starts right up. Other times, especially if it has been sitting idle for awhile, you turn the key and nothing happens.

~ Bert Dodson

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

~ Henry David Thoreau

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

~ Howard Jacobson

Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There’s no longer a need for the social construct of religion.

~ David G. Mcafee

The phrase I dont know is the most honest thing anyone could ever say.

~ Markus W. Lunner

Art is a reflection of poetry and beauty of the heart and mind without the use of any words.

~ Debasish Mridha

Art is a relection of the mind and a vision of the heart.

~ Debasish Mridha

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice.

~ Boris Pasternak

So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?

~ John Cage

Art was art, humans were humans, but art was best when it was human.

~ Jonathan Smith