We all need some quotations on art to help keep us inspired. Here are some of our absolute all time favourites. Please keep chasing all of your art dreams.

Table Of Contents

60 Quotations on Art Including Pictures and Captions

The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.
―  Leonardo da Vinci

Art is a line around your thoughts.
―  Gustav Klimt

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
―  Paul Cezanne

A true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.
―  Salvador Dali

Success is a worn down pencil.
―  Robert Rauschenberg

Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
―  John Berger

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
―  Pablo Picasso

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
―  Henry David Thoreau

When I paint, I never think of selling. People fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.
―  Edvard Munch

There is no must in art because art is free.
―  Wassily Kandinsky

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.
―  Anselm Kiefer

The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
―  Neil Gaiman

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
―  Aristotle

While drawing I discover what I really want to say.
―  Dario Fo

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colours flowers, so does art colour life.
―  John Lubbock

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
―  Leonardo da Vinci

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture, with the advantage of permanence.
―  Henri Matisse

As I work at my drawings, day after day, what seemed unattainable before is now gradually becoming possible. Slowly, I’m learning to observe and measure. I don’t stand quite so helpless before nature any longer.
―  Vincent van Gogh

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
―  Stella Adler

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
―  Michelangelo

If you as a designer don’t believe in your design and don’t see it beyond the context of the film, instead of as a real creature in a real world then how can you expect the audience to believe it?
―  Peter Jackson

In drawing, one must look for or suspect that there is more than is casually seen.
―  George Bridgman

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.
―  Chuck Close

I started painting as a hobby when I was little. I didn’t know I had any talent. I believe talent is just a pursued interest. Anybody can do what I do.
―  Bob Ross

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
―  Marc Chagall

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
―  Anais Nin

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.
―  Ray Bradbury

Artists are just children who refuse to put down their crayons.
―  Al Hirschfeld

Every artist was first an amateur.
―  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
―  Leo Tolstoy

You have a million excuses. Write anyway.
―  Carrie Kei Heim

An empty canvas is full.
―  Robert Rauschenberg

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
―  Albert Einstein

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.
―  Joan Miro

My idea of heaven is to wake up, have a good breakfast, and spend the rest of the day drawing.
―  Peter Falk

For me drawing is an attempt to understand what I feel about the world I live in.
―  Brian Froud

Painting from nature is not copying the object, it’s realising one’s sensations.
―  Paul Cezanne

Creativity is taking the best skills and techniques from experts around you and improving upon them.
―  Unknown

How you draw is a reflection of how you feel about the world. You’re not capturing it, you’re interpreting it.
―  Juliette Aristides

The great artists of the past were aware that human life is full of chaos and suffering. But they had a remedy for this. And the name of that remedy was ‘beauty’. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy. It shows human life to be worthwhile.
―  Roger Scruton

Stay firmly in your path and dare. Be wild two hours a day!
―  Paul Gauguin

Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people that would otherwise have melted from my memory.
―  David Gentleman

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.
―  Edgar Degas

What keeps my heart awake is colourful silence.
―  Claude Monet

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
―  Jackson Pollock

Practice what you know and it will help you to make clear what you do not know.
―  Rembrandt

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.
―  Keith Haring

Drawing is vision on paper.
―  Andrew Loomis

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter’s identity, his style, his conviction, and then colour is just a gift to the drawing.
―  Fernando Botero

It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.
―  Paul Cezanne

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.
―  Joan Miro

If you enjoyed this article please feel free to read our article ‘Quotations About Drawing,’ here:

Quotations About Drawing – 55 Amazing Quotes About Drawing & Creativity

Or our ‘How to Draw Angel’s Wings,’ Tutorial:

https://artworldblog.com/2021/06/09/how-to-draw-angels-wings/

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https://artworldblog.com/2021/09/02/peach-drawing-how-to-draw-a-peach-in-9-easy-steps/

If you are looking for another brilliant article on art quotations you could try:
https://cravepainting.com/blog/quotes-about-art