Art Quotes

Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new film, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul.

~ Jim Jarmusch

What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it.Isn't it?

~ Ayn Rand

Calligraphy is a geometry of the soul which manifests itself physically.

~ Plato

For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.

~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Don't try to follow trends. Create them.

~ Simon Zingerman

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

An artist without ideas is a mendicant; barren, he goes begging among the hours.

~ Irving Stone

Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience.

~ Molly Peacock

Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought.

~ Albert Pinkham Ryder

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a let a picture inspire a thousand words.

~ Nicholas Boyd Crutchley

Još uvijek silno vjerujem u umjetnost kao medikament!

~ Jasna Horvat

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.

~ John R. Stilgoe

Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition.

~ Maurice Chevalier

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Art builds upon art, builds upon art...nothing is purely original. We're all inspired by something...or someone. It's a never-ending chain of ideas...and it's magical.

~ Shannon Taylor Hodnett

It has been my personal experience that as I allow the painting to speak I become lost, it is delicious and at the same time frightening. The best ones, to me, have a life of their own.

~ Luther E. Vann

Our tragedy is their beauty. Our pain is their art. The beatific bereavement that is our life captured on a canvas for all the world to see.

~ Solange Nicole

In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe in us, by listening, by praise, by appreciation, by laughing. If you are going to write, you must become aware of this richness in you and come to believe in it and know it is there so that you can write opulently with with self-trust. Once you become aware of it, have faith in it, you will be all right. But it is like this: if you have a million dollars in the bank and don't know, it doesn't so you any good.

~ Brenda Ueland

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

~ Toni Morrison

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

~ Walter Gropius

Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both.

~ Ted Gioia

There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art—so much that I'd try and make it for myself.

~ Sara Baume

You have to believe that your voice can mean something. You have to believe that what you do matters. And you have to keep going even on days you can't find that belief. If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of. You do it despite the doubts and the struggles. You do it because it's what you came here to do.That's what makes an artist.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Doggedness in art is no substitute for inspiration.

~ Benjamin Wood

Solitary walks are great for getting new ideas. It's like you're in a video game and you pick up idea coins on the way.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

~ Jack London

Teaching mathematics, like teaching any art, requires the ability to inspire the student. Inspiration requires marketing, and marketing requires stirring communication.

~ Hartosh Singh Bal

Sometimes, when inspiration runs dry, I drink classical music until my words spill out.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Toutes les erreurs de la critique commises à mon égard, à mes débuts, furent qu'elle ne vit pas qu'il ne fallait rien définir, rien comprendre, rien limiter, rien préciser, parce que tout ce qui est sincèrement et docilement nouveau - comme le beau d'ailleurs, porte sa signification en soi-même. La désignation par un titre mis à mes dessins est quelquefois de trop, pour ainsi dire. Le titre n'y est justifié que lorsqu'il est vague, indéterminé, et visant même confusément à l'équivoque. Mes dessins inspirent et ne se définissent pas. Ils ne déterminent rien. Ils nous placent, ainsi que la musique, dans le monde ambigu de l'indéterminé. Ils sont une sorte de métaphore.

~ Odilon Redon

Yoga is the art work of awareness on the canvas of body, mind, and soul.

~ Amit Ray

I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.

~ Dodie Smith

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.

~ Nick Hornby

At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.

~ Banksy

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

~ Albert Einstein

We...believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.

~ Irving Stone

After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection--not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose their monkey fur, from the elements. Eventually, they started transposing their hunting fantasies onto cave walls in the form of pictures, first as an attempt at practical magic and later for the strange, unexpected pleasure they discovered in artistic creation. Time passed. Art came off the walls and turned into ritual. Ritual became religion. Religion spawned science. Science led to big business. And big business, if it continues on its present mindless, voracious trajectory, could land those of us lucky enough to survive its ultimate legacy back into caves again.

~ Tom Robbins