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Art Quotes

Art quotes deal with the healing nature of both beauty and creative expression in our lives. We are all artists and creators. The nature of creativity is different in each of us.



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The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.
Mikhail Baryshnikov

Art upsets, science reasures.
Georges Braque

Art is whatever you can get away with.
John Cage

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.
Julia Cameron

In a sense, as we are creative beings, our lives become our work of art.
Julia Cameron

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.
Julia Cameron

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step.
Julia Cameron

I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.
Emily Carr

Look at the earth crowded with growth, new and old bursting from their strong roots hidden in the silent, live ground, each seed according to its own kind…each one knowing what to do, each one demanding its own rights on the earth. So artist, you too from the depths of your soul...let your roots creep forth, gaining strength.
Emily Carr

A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.
Willa Cather

Each of us possesses a creative self. Claiming that is a transformational art. When you begin to act on your creativity,what you find inside may be more valuable than what you produce for the external world. The ultimate creative act is to express what is most authentic and individual about you.
Eileen M. Clegg

The difference between famous creators and struggling artists is that the creators know that improving the lives of others deserves the highest reward.
Alan Cohen

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning. Every day I find something creative to do with my life.
Miles Davis

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes de Mille

An artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Eugene Delacroix

All art, whether it pleases us or not, helps to add color, excitement, joy, or sadness and, most often, a sense of awe to our life's experience.
Henry O. Dorman

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
Will Durant

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
Albert Einstein

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Anatole France

The capacity to be puzzled is…the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
Erich Fromm

Artists everywhere steal mercilessly all the time and I think this is healthy.
Peter Gabriel

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Paul Gauguin

Art is a step from what is obvious toward what is concealed.
Kahlil Gibran

An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo. And an artist takes it personally.
Seth Goden

Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
Seth Goden

Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. The medium doesn't matter. The intent does.
Seth Goden

Art is not in the ...eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.
Seth Goden

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is a delivery system for worldviews.
Alex Grey

Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.
Hippocrates

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.
Jasper Johns

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its supreme purpose through him.
Carl Jung

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
Garson Kanin

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don’t dare reveal.
Elia Kazan

Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew.
Ellen Langler

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.
Fran Lebowitz

Art is the child of Nature.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.
Shirley MacLaine

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.
Abraham Maslow

Art is like singing. Some do it better than others, but everyone can and should be doing it for their soul.
Barbara Mason

Trust the process of the subtle push toward art and creative expression from inside you – it is the gentle call of your heart and renewed search for soul. It is an opening to expansion of your expressive abilities and the discovery of hidden limitations ready to be challenged. Be open to what it means, it has many possibilities for action in every part of your life. Ultimately it will lead to significant personal changes – to living life in a new way with new tools of creative expression.
Donald William Mathews

All people are struggling to be creative in some way, and the artist is the one who has succeeded in this task of life.
Rollo May

What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?
Rollo May

Creation is a sentient and instinctual flow that determines where to go and what to change or omit.
Shaun McNiff

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

Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.
Michelangelo

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all.
Michelangelo

Paint as you like and die happy.
Henry Miller

Drawing is a door to discovering your own creativity.
Jonathan Milne

Art is a language. It's not a skill. It's not a stunt. It's not something that you just learn to do and put it down. It comes from the heart.
Wynona Mulcaster

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.
Elizabeth Murray

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch

Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the journey of a free soul.
Alev Oguz

Surprises are the joy of living. Surprises directly touch the soul. Good surprises energize and bad surprises teach.
Alev Oguz

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it at the bud. Creativity is now something we can turn on and off like a faucet. It is an experience and expression in our lives that must be nurtured. This nurturing process means that creativity is at once a skill, an art, and a life-style.
Alex Osborn

Destroying something, any idiot can do. Creating needs intelligence.
Osho

All art is subversive.
Pablo Picasso

Every act of creation begins with an act of destruction.
Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up
Pablo Picasso

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

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.
Renoir

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
M.C. Richards

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill-take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edges of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.
Tom Robbins

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

Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.
Ron Rolheiser

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.
John Ruskin

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm. To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts, such is the duty of the artist.
Robert Schumann

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.
Sir Walter Scott

People kept telling me art can't change the world; so I stopped calling what I did art.
Carl Scrase

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck

The art of life isn't controlling what happens, which is impossible; it's using what happens.
Gloria Steinem

I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
D.T. Suzuki

Music is the purest form of art... therefore true poets, they who are seers, seek to express the universe in terms of music... The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside.
Rabindranath Tagore

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp

It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and everyone who works is scrubbing some part.
Henry David Thoreau

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create form a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
Eckhart Tolle

All art requires courage.
Anne Tucker

If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent van Gogh

It is the language of nature to which one has to listen.
Vincent van Gogh

The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
Walt Whitman

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
Jeanette Winterson

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

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola



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