Art and Words That Will Inspire You
Throughout art history we have been enthralled and inspired by the art and quotes by famous artists. This page has been created to bring information and inspiration to our readers. We update this page regularly with images and quotations that are positive and healing. They may also be provocative and thought-provoking.
Please visit often! If your favorite famous artist’s quote isn’t here please add it to the comments below.
Unfortunately, there seems to no quotes in existence by Botticelli; however, this work of art has been described as “Mars lies asleep, presumably after lovemaking, while Venus watches as infant satyrs play with his military gear, and one tries to rouse him by blowing a conch shell in his ear.” The painting is presumed to have been created to celebrate a marriage, and decorate the bedchamber.
“Color! What a deep and mysterious language. It is the language of dreams.” ~ Paul Gauguin
“I shut my eyes in order to see.” ~ Paul Gauguin
“Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“I am independent! I can live and I love to work.” ~ Mary Cassatt
“Look at life with the eyes of a child.” ~ Henri Matisse
“I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it.” ~ Henri Matisse
“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced.” ~ Vincent van Gogh
“In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.” Vincent Van Gogh
“Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.” ~ Wassily Kandinsky
“I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could…”
“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”~ Wassily Kandinsky
“If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man jumping out of a window in the time it takes him to fall from the fourth story to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works.” ~ Eugène Delacroix
“If I think, everything is lost.” “Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.” ~ Paul Cézanne
“The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.” ~ Rene Magritte
“Art is a line around your thoughts.” ~ Gustav Klimt
“What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious, the mystery of the instinctive in the human race.” ~ Amadeo Modigliani
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing–and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” ~ Degas
“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.” – Joan Miro
“My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” ~ Pablo Picasso
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.” ~ Pablo Picasso
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” – Pablo Picasso
“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works: if from the head, almost nothing.” ~ Marc Chagall
“No longer would interiors, people who read and women who knit, be painted. There should be living people who breathe and feel, suffer and love.” ~ Edvard Munch in his “Saint-Cloud Manifesto” in 1889.
“Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.” ~ Henri Rousseau
“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” ~ Edward Hopper
“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life of the artist, and this innerlife will result in his personal vision of the world.” – Edward Hopper
“The true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature.” ~ George Inness
“My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected color areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein
I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ~ Claude Monet
“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” ~ James McNeill Whistler
“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.” ~ Paul Klee
“Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.” ~ Paul Klee
“A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.” ~ Paul Klee
“All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!” ~ Paul Klee
“For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.” ~ Georges Rouault
“I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.” ~ Frida Kahlo
“My illustrious lordship, I’ll show you what a woman can do.” ~ Artemisia Gentileschi
“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” ~ Auguste Rodin
“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.” ~ Auguste Rodin
“A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.” ~ Salvador Dali
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” ~ Salvador Dali
“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” ~ Francis Bacon
“Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.” ~ Francis Bacon
“I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.” ~ Emily Carr
More Inspirational Art Quotes
“I was the first woman to paint cleanly, and that was the basis of my success. From a hundred pictures, mine will always stand out. And so the galleries began to hang my work in their best rooms, always in the middle, because my painting was attractive. It was precise. It was ‘finished.'” ~ Tamara de Lempicka
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” ~ Michelangelo
“To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.” ~ Dorothea Lange
“The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.” ~ Henry Moore
“I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.” ~ Henry Moore
“I just decided, when someone says you can’t do something. DO MORE OF IT.” ~ Faith Ringgold
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” ~ Ansel Adams
“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don’t see a different purpose for it now.” ~ Dorothea Tanning
“I can’t understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism. Despite the general pessimistic attitude in the world today, I am nothing but an optimist.” ~ Hans Hofmann
“One who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color with another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinite variety of images.” ~ Sonia Delaunay
“Once I knew that I wanted to be an artist, I had made myself into one. I did not understand that wanting doesn’t always lead to action. Many of the women had been raised without the sense that they could mold and shape their own lives, and so, wanting to be an artist (but without the ability to realize their wants) was, for some of them, only an idle fantasy, like wanting to go to the moon.” ~ Judy Chicago
“Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.” ~ Anni Albers
“I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.” ~ Jean-Michel Basquiat
“I would rather wait for a public that will come fifty years – a hundred years – after my death.” ~ Marcel Duchamp, when asked whether he cared what his contemporaries thought of him
“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked… I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute” ~ Helen Frankenthaler
“Before I start carving the idea must be almost complete. I say ‘almost’ because the really important thing seems to be the sculptor’s ability to let his intuition guide him over the gap between conception and realization without compromising the integrity of the original idea.” ~ Barbara Hepworth
“When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.” ~ Alex Grey
“Happiness is being on the beam with life – to feel the pull of life.” ~ Agnes Martin=
“I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.” ~ Jackson Pollock
“Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment. ” ~ Diego Rivera
“I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.” ~ Gustave Courbet
“I was supporting myself, but nothing like the guy painters, as I refer to them. I always resented that actually… we were all getting the same amount of press, but they were going gangbusters with sales.”
~ Cindy Sherman
“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” ~ Jean Dubuffet
“I want the people looking at my work to feel a sense of all the possibilities of painting, and, through that, in life as a whole. When that happens, I feel I’ve accomplished something useful.” ~ Wolf Kahn
“‘Painting’ and ‘religious experience’ are the same thing. It is a question of the perpetual motion of a right idea.” ~ Ben Nicholson
“The only thing that matters is that you are original and find your own voice. One could perhaps divide painters into two categories: those who have something to tell and those who do not.” ~ Odd Nerdrum
EXCELLENT—AWESOME—THANK YOU I am getting words and phrases for my poetry related to art sculptures for FULL CIRCLE LOVE art show APPRECIATE YOU A BUNCH
You’re welcome Bob!
I truly relished this article.
Thankyou!
Reading the words of the ‘greats’ re-ignites my fire.
May everyone rest easy
Always looking for thought-provoking quotes, especially artists. It helps my students to better understand the person behind the painting. Art is timeless, but knowing something more about who created it and what was happening in their world gives us insight into their soul. Thank you for this thoroughly magnificent collection!
Thank you so much for this helpful list! It is especially nice to have the artists’ work near his or her quote. I am teaching a workshop and want to have quotes available – The healing power of art is so important! I am learning to accept the needs of students who have undergone chemotherapy and other struggles and try to understand their individual needs such as aversion to certain colors! Thank you.
You’re welcome Janis. You may also want to read “Dozens of Facts About The Power of Color” and please add any comments to that page regarding what you’re experiencing with your students about color.
Art and Quotes by Famous Artists
By Renee Phillips
Are the above quotes compiled into one hardcover book that I can purchase?
Also, I’m unsure what I should put in the Website box.
Hi Susan, Thank you for your question. No, this is an ongoing selection of quotes on this website and not available in book format. Although there are a lot of books with quotes, so you can check amazon or your local bookstore. If we create an ebook at a later date we will announce it here.
Hello,
Do you have the primary source of Edward Hopper’s quote? I’d like to use it for my dissertation.
Thanks!
Kind regards,
Li
Li, I’m sorry, I cannot say for sure. The primary sources for the quotes by famous artists on this page have been collected over several years. We have an extensive library of art history books and have referred to many online resources such as the artists’ websites and museum websites. Best wishes with your dissertation.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance & conscientious stupidity. Martin L. King.
Sarah Rose Sharp says:
“…there is something divine about looking at the potential of our world, and reaching for clay.”
These are beautiful and thought provoking!
I believe you might be mistakenly attributing the Francis Bacon quote, “In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present,” to the painter (Francis Bacon, 1909-1992), when it is properly of the philosopher, Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Though, too, I believe that reinterpreting the quote in accord with the painter is a rich, worthwhile exercise!
Thank you Melanie for catching this mistake.
We replaced the quote with a new one by Francis Bacon, the artist: “Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.” It fits nicely with The Healing Power of ART & ARTISTS perspective.
What a terrific compilation! Just what i was looking for…..and now, onward to the blog.
I love these quotes and your articles. Thank you for creating The Healing Power of Art website. There’s nothing like it. I just signed up to receive your free weekly email newsletter so I don’t miss anything new. Keep up the wonderful contributions you’re making. We all need a place to go to get reinspired and renewed, and learn more about the many benefits of art. Thank you for providing that and much more.
This page is awesome!
Thank you, Renee. These are wonderful! One of my favourites, “Art enables us to find ourselves, and lose ourselves, at the same time.” Thomas Merton
I am interested in opinions guidance suggestions resources and help in my art and becoming more established in the artists communities.
Hi Denise,
Thank you for visiting and your comment. In addition to resources we offer on this website, I think you will also enjoy visiting my other website http://www.renee-phillips.com that has a wealth of art and business articles to help artists. And, as far as receiving personalized career guidance you’ll find information there about how to obtain a consultation.
Best regards,
Renee
“The greatest mystery is not that we should be tossed by chance amongst the profusion of matter and the welter of stars; it is, rather, that within this prison we are able to draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”
Andre Malraux
Beautiful!
Anais Nin said, “My work must be the closest to the life flow. I must install myself inside of the seed, growth, mysteries. I must prove the possibility of the instantaneous, immediate spontaneous art. My art must be like a miracle. Before it goes through the conduits of the brain and becomes an abstraction, a fiction, a lie. It must be for woman, more like a personified ancient ritual, where every spiritual thought was made visible, enacted, represented.”
Her art heals me.
Thank you Loren. I love your website for the women who “want to age consciously, purposefully and with your eyes wide open.” http://loranhills.com/.
Hi Loren, thanks for this comment. I am working on a dissertation for a masters in Critical and Creative Writing, a very gratifying project for this older artist/mother/woman. Do have primary source for Anais Nin’s comment above?
Jorie, you’ll find the quote here: ANAÏS NIN: EXERPTS FROM THE DIARY https://anaisnin.org. Here’s a tip: When searching for sources of quotes by famous people google their name and a few words from the quote. Good luck with your project.
Thanks Renee,thanks to you and a friend, I have accessed the diary from the library and in the meantime am enjoying the above website.